Wake-on-LAN & alternatives?

Question

My supervisor has asked me to come up with a Wake-on-LAN or WoL-like solution for a project related to allowing specific employees to VPN into machines of various power states. From what I've seen, Wake Timers, WoL/Magic Packet, and some software implementations may work. The main concern is that some employees have a nasty habit of shutting down their machine when they leave work (and are quite untrainable). Other tidbits:

• Altering any settings in company routers or any sort of suggested DNS services are off-limits.
• Paid services are discouraged.
• Windows 7 is the relevant OS. All of those who need it are 64-bit, but a solution for both 32-bit and 64-bit is preferred. It would be nice if the solution worked for Windows Server 2008 as well.
• All machines within the company are wired and are WoL & Magic Packet capable.
• The machines that may need to VPN in will vary from desktops to laptops to tablets and possibly mobile smart devices, such as smartphones.

Bottom line: Is Wake-on-LAN the best way to allow employees to VPN into the company's network/their machine when the machine in question may be in sleep mode or even not powered on? If not, what alternatives are there?

If you need any more information, just ask.

Answer 1

Look into "[Integrated] Lights Out Management" (LOM, iLOM, ILO) or other "Out of Band Management" solutions. Many enterprise-class PC providers have solutions for being able to remotely boot a fully shut-down machine.

I've used LOM on a server before. It used an early iteration of Intel's Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) technology. Basically, the server's LOM/IPMI-capable Ethernet NICs would stay powered up even when the rest of the motherboard was shut down, and they had their own little microcontrollers on them that allowed them to have their own IP addresses on the network. So you could tell the IPMI client software to connect to that IP address, and it could tell you some basic things about the state of the host system (like if it was running or not) and let you do a few basic things to it (boot it, wake it, shut it down, force-reboot it).

It's possible you could get some LOM-capable NICs to install into the PCs of the worst shutdown-prone users. The part I'm not sure about is if takes a special motherboard to support the LOM-capable NICs. On the server I had, the LOM-capable NICs were integrated into the motherboard. I think in other designs it's a separate PCIe NIC with a couple special ribbon cables so it can stay powered and trigger a boot or reboot.

Answer 2

This sounds like the wrong way to go about it to me. In my personal experience, WoL is horribly unreliable. You would at least need an intermediate machine for users to log in to in order to broadcast the 'Magic Packet' (the troubleshooting section directly beneath that is worth a read too). Since you can't monkey with the router settings, you're not going to be sending the Magic Packet from outside your network, not that you'd really want to try anyway.

Your best bet might be to disable automatic sleep via GPO. This TechNet Blog Post might come in handy, even if you do attempt WoL. For the exceptionally stupid, you can even remove the shutdown and sleep buttons (that's under User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Start Menu and Taskbar).

If you could spend a little money, it might be worth pitching a small terminal server project. That sounds like what you really need.

But really, I think you should let the users who shut off their machines and expect to access them later suffer. That's just silly.