[K12OSN] WOL in fl_teachertool for clients--works

[Peter Scheie]

At my son's school, as part of their energy saving policy, having things 
such as computers automatically startup at set time is prohibited.  The 
Dell laptops we're using already have a BIOS setting which can be set to 
automatically turn on the machine at a designated time, but I've been 
told we can't use that.  In light of the policy, I think a simple icon 
on the teacher's desktop that calls a script that turns the machines on 
would be best, rather than putting it in fl_tt.  However, as mentioned 
previously, these Dell Latitudes (model C600) do not respond to WOL 
packets, or at least I haven't been able to make them work.  Yes, the 
BIOS is setup, yes, I've run the debug switch, etc.; I've even tried 
using just a crossover cable between sender and client, to no avail. 
OTOH, I've got a iPaq that does wakeup!  Oddly, if I use ltspinfo to 
remotely shut the machine down, then it will not respond to a WOL 
packet; it only works if the machine was turned off by hand using the 
power switch.  I've seen mention of this on the LTSP list, but no 
resolution.

As to a script that would run by cron or by icon to wake up a list of 
machines, you could do something simple like this:

for x i $(cat room1.txt)
do
ether-wake $x
# sleep for five seconds so clients don't all start at once
sleep 5
done

where room1.txt is a file that contains the list of MAC addresses of the 
machine you want to wake up.  Put the above commands into a file, make 
it executable, create an icon on the teacher's desktop that calls it, 
and then the teacher just clicks on the icon and the machines will all 
turn on one by one.

Petre

Barry Cisna wrote:
> Robert,
> 
>   I'm sure you are right. The best setup for waking clients would be ina
> cron job at say 7:45am each day of school. I just thought it would be
> handy to have an " option" in fl_tt to enable teachers to start the thin
> clients as well,say for instance if another teacher came in to use their
> room and shut all the PC's off.
> Question: how would I "group" pc's to be ether-wake(ed)? For
> example,gather all MAC addresses in room1 , all MAC addresses in
> room2,etc. Could I do a cron for
> ' ether-wake -file room1 '
> ' ether-wake -file room2 '
> ,, to turn on ONLY room1 thin clients
> ,, to turn on only room2 thin clients ?
> I'm not smart enough to code this ,,duuhh..
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Barry Cisna
> 
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