[SOLVED] Wake on lan not working

[Fye]

Hello, I work at a gaming center and we have 180 PCs and its a hassle to turn them on manually one by one. I tried enabling wake on lan but its still not working, i tried all type of settings but there is no option for WOL in the bios, but its turned on by default in windows settings. Though i tried all types of WOL software.
these are the settings on windows

https://imgur.com/a/fbgJYDm

View: https://imgur.com/a/fbgJYDm


I noticed one thing, and i was unable to figure out why, the ethernet port on the computer isn't blinking while computer is off, and i don't know how to fix that.

thank you, i would really appreciate the help

 

[Ralston18]

Certainly I do not know the entire setup of your network and gaming environment.

However, there is a good possibility that you could use Poweshell.

Reference:

https://ccmexec.com/2019/01/wake-up...computers-in-configmgr-1810-using-powershell/

You can easily find other similar links and it should be straight forward to do some testing targeting select representative PCs.

As for the LEDs, start with the following generic link:

https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000445.htm

Overall, the actual meanings (based on LED colors/flashing) would be found in the applicable adapter documentation.

 

[bill001g]

This is a hardware feature that both the motherboard/bios and the ethernet chip needs to support. In effect the ethernet chip is acting as a small cpu watching the data. The main cpu and memory etc it all powered off. If you do not see the option in your bios it may not be supported.

What we did with remote server racks was to put in a power distribution unit that could turn power on and off for a outlet. The machines were set to boot as soon as they got power. This used to be very expensive but you can get powerstrips that can do it now days.

Most machines support boot on power. You might not need anything special if the machines are on say a different circuit breaker you could then turn them all on and off with one switch.

 

[MJS WARLORD]

Hello Fye does this article help you

How to Enable Wake-on-LAN in Windows 10

Wake-on-LAN is an advanced feature that can come in handy in many home and business networking scenarios. Here's a look at using it with Windows 10.

www.groovypost.com

 

[Fye]

Hello Fye does this article help you

How to Enable Wake-on-LAN in Windows 10

Wake-on-LAN is an advanced feature that can come in handy in many home and business networking scenarios. Here's a look at using it with Windows 10.

www.groovypost.com

I already followed all the articles I could find, but none helped. thank you tho

 

[Fye]

This is a hardware feature that both the motherboard/bios and the ethernet chip needs to support. In effect the ethernet chip is acting as a small cpu watching the data. The main cpu and memory etc it all powered off. If you do not see the option in your bios it may not be supported.

What we did with remote server racks was to put in a power distribution unit that could turn power on and off for a outlet. The machines were set to boot as soon as they got power. This used to be very expensive but you can get powerstrips that can do it now days.

Most machines support boot on power. You might not need anything special if the machines are on say a different circuit breaker you could then turn them all on and off with one switch.

All of our computers are the Asus ROG Strix GL10CS, I tried contacting Asus support but there was no possible way i could get in contact with them :/ Not sure if they support WOL yet but im determined to keep trying.

 

[Fye]

Certainly I do not know the entire setup of your network and gaming environment.

However, there is a good possibility that you could use Poweshell.

Reference:

https://ccmexec.com/2019/01/wake-up...computers-in-configmgr-1810-using-powershell/

You can easily find other similar links and it should be straight forward to do some testing targeting select representative PCs.

As for the LEDs, start with the following generic link:

https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000445.htm

Overall, the actual meanings (based on LED colors/flashing) would be found in the applicable adapter documentation.

Thank you, all of these are very helpful, I'll look into them. I just had an idea, could it be the firewall blocking the magic packets? we are using Fortigate firewall in our server rack.

 

[kanewolf]

One simple thing to check is if the PCs maintain a connection to the network switch. You should see link lights from all your PCs.

 

[Ralston18]

Fortinite/Fortigate firewall.

Lots of documentation:

https://helpdesk.thinix.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002566551-Fortinet-Firewall-Configuration-Guide

I found the following link:

https://forum.fortinet.com/tm.aspx?m=177346

Check the Fortigate documentation with regards to stopping or passing the WOL packet(s).

Going out of my comfort zone. Plus details matter.

Take a close look at your current configuration and the documentation.

Then, if you find a possible way, set up a controlled test. Do not immediately apply to all devices.

Are all 180 PCs in the same subnet? If not then that will need to be addressed.

 

[Fye]

Fortinite/Fortigate firewall.

Lots of documentation:

https://helpdesk.thinix.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002566551-Fortinet-Firewall-Configuration-Guide

I found the following link:

https://forum.fortinet.com/tm.aspx?m=177346

Check the Fortigate documentation with regards to stopping or passing the WOL packet(s).

Going out of my comfort zone. Plus details matter.

Take a close look at your current configuration and the documentation.

Then, if you find a possible way, set up a controlled test. Do not immediately apply to all devices.

Are all 180 PCs in the same subnet? If not then that will need to be addressed.

they are on the same subnet, I started to believe that the hardware isn't wake on lan able hence there's no option in the bios menu.

 

[Ralston18]

Going back to your original post ( #1):

Under the Advanced tab, further down, is there a "Wake on Magic Packet" property and is that property enabled?

Reference:

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/enable-wake-on-lan-windows-10/

 

[SamirD]

I have found that even with WOL enabled, they don't wake up immediately. I usually have to feed them a magic packet several times before they wake.

A really quick and dirty solution is to make the systems always boot up upon restoration of power in the bios, and then use power strips to group systems together. This way, you can boot several systems at once when turning them on. Depending on how many systems you can group together on a strip, you can boot 10x or more with the press of a button, reducing 180 button presses to just 18 or less.

 

[Ralston18]

Power strips are a possibility but I would be rather leery of most retail versions. And even commercial products may not be suitable unless really intended for large scale applications.

If it comes to physically switching on/off then I would very much lean towards power distribution units as mentioned by @bill001g in Post #3.

I did note the need to feed in several magic packet to rouse a system.

Powershell would most likely be able to do that.

For example:

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Send-WOL-packet-using-0638be7b

And there are similar scripts to be found.

Overall caveat being that OP (or anyone for that matter) should not just start launching scripts in hopes that one script will work.

The script must be tailored/customized to the network environment and carefully tested on one or two computers, then a group of computers, and finally the entire network.

Takes, time, effort, and discipline.

However, the matter remains: can the PCs even be woken up?

 

[nigelivey]

This is a hardware feature that both the motherboard/bios and the ethernet chip needs to support. In effect the ethernet chip is acting as a small cpu watching the data. The main cpu and memory etc it all powered off. If you do not see the option in your bios it may not be supported.

What we did with remote server racks was to put in a power distribution unit that could turn power on and off for a outlet. The machines were set to boot as soon as they got power. This used to be very expensive but you can get powerstrips that can do it now days.

Most machines support boot on power. You might not need anything special if the machines are on say a different circuit breaker you could then turn them all on and off with one switch.

Are you seriously recommending shutting down machines every night by just killing the power? Well known and demonstrated issues:

• Windows Corruption (or your flavor of Operating System)
• File system Corruption
• Program Corruption
• Data Loss, any file that is open when power is lost may get corrupted or not have been saved
• Hardware Damage (Hard drives didn't spin down, park Read/Write Heads correctly, flash drives may be in the middle of a write operation)

 

[bill001g]

Are you seriously recommending shutting down machines every night by just killing the power? Well known and demonstrated issues:

• Windows Corruption (or your flavor of Operating System)
• File system Corruption
• Program Corruption
• Data Loss, any file that is open when power is lost may get corrupted or not have been saved
• Hardware Damage (Hard drives didn't spin down, park Read/Write Heads correctly, flash drives may be in the middle of a write operation)

You can shut them down with software. Then turn the power off and back on to force them to boot in the morning.