Rogue WOL issue

[CommodoreS]

I recently enabled WOL on some Lenovo PCs so I can start them remotely to work on them if needed and also schedule them to boot in the morning ready for teachers to use if required.

 

However since doing this they are turning themselves on at random times, but all at the same time and the times are random - 6PM one night, 8PM another night and 3AM another. The machines are being shut down and not sent to sleep, so it can only be some kind of LAN magic packet or pattern waking them.

 

Interestingly I started using sleep mode on my home PC recently and noticed sometimes the PC would just keep bringing itself out of sleep. Running powercfg -lastwake showed that the network card was bringing the machine out of sleep, however no other PCs were switched on the home network - only the Internet, home media smart tv and, phone and iPad in standby. Disabling the WOL features inside Windows 7 stopped the machine coming out of sleep, but I am still wondering what could have been sending a command to the network card to wake it - I can only guess something over the internet?

 

As the machines at the school are using BIOS WOL I doubt disabling the Window 7 NIC WOL would solve the problem, and even it it does I am then turning WOL off, whereas I would like to use it but can't have machines waking themselves up. The BIOS options for WOL are limited but I have only enabled WOL through the NIC.

 

Did a fair bit of searching to try and solve this one and came up with nothing, so if anyone has had a similar problem any help would be appreciated.

[CommodoreS]

Anyone have any ideas on this? I still don't seem to have solved this yet.

[Oaktech]

I'm sorry, I have nothing to add to help you solve your problem, but your mention of powercfg -lastwake has just helped me solve a problem I'm having! So thanks for that!

[sted]

do you have spiceworks as this can do that depending how its set

[Duke5A]

The machines are being woken up by a pattern match and it sounds like you only want it being done by a magic packet. Go into Device Manager on the machine, bring up the properties for the wired NIC and go to the Power Management tab. There should be a check box to only allow waking by a magic packet.

 

I know technically this should only affect S3 power states, but give it a try.