How are you shutting down / waking up your W10 machines these days?

[CharlesGreig]

Hi, I used to use impero's WOL feature to turn on and off the machines on our school network outside of school hours but since I got us up to W10 this nolonger works - they suggest using hibernate, but, I don't know about you guys, I don't have enough available diskspace on a bunch of my machines SSD's to have hibernate enabled.

 

Anyway, with that out the window, I have tried some free WOL options but nothing gave me either reliability or granularity that I was hoping to achieve so I thought I would see what you fine people use?

 

Thanks

[thimon]

I found with Windows 10 you need to manually install the latest LAN drivers for your machine, then in device manager enable WOL as it's not on by default. Never found a way to do this automatically. Don't bother with this anymore as we rebuild machines each summer, way too much work to do this!

[Jawloms]

Hi, I used to use impero's WOL feature to turn on and off the machines on our school network outside of school hours but since I got us up to W10 this nolonger works

 

Should do, does here.

 

You may need to do this;

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/197476-win-10-hybrid-shutdown.html#post1687536

[CharlesGreig]

How many machines do you have? My main concern is I have ~500+ machines churning through electricity over night every night for no reason, if not for the cost implications, the environmental ones are enough that I will have to give it a decent look.

 

Appreciate your feedback though

[ThatBoringBloke]

I used PDQ Deploy to schedule a shutdown each night.

[CharlesGreig]

Should do, does here.

 

You may need to do this;

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/197476-win-10-hybrid-shutdown.html#post1687536

 

I don't know, I mean, I was on the phone to Impero support and they just said it doesn't do it anymore - because of the load that it puts on the network - which I pointed out to them was clearly not the case as that would be miniscule (magic packets to WOL probably pale into insignificance compared to all the youtube vids and junk that people are looking at in the day and certainly, I don't care if it happens at 7am and 8pm!)

 

I'm not suggesting WOL doesn't work on W10, more that it doesn't on W10 and Impero - it was them that told me this.

 

I'll have a look at this though.

[TechMonkey]

We use Emco Remote Shutdown Enterprise, which also does wake up. I have a strong feeling though that if your hardware isn't working with WOL then no solution will help. Check the power and NIC settings in the BIOS. You need to check the power mode it is on (must be S3 or S4) and if the NIC is onboard that it can wake the PC or that WOL is enabled.

[CharlesGreig]

I used PDQ Deploy to schedule a shutdown each night.

Is PDQ Deploy decent value for edu? I assume you use this instead of SCCM for your machines software too?

 

Thanks

[CharlesGreig]

We use Emco Remote Shutdown Enterprise, which also does wake up. I have a strong feeling though that if your hardware isn't working with WOL then no solution will help. Check the power and NIC settings in the BIOS. You need to check the power mode it is on (must be S3 or S4) and if the NIC is onboard that it can wake the PC or that WOL is enabled.

 

WOL works, its Impero's implementation that doesn't work as it did. I really only want to turn on and off classroom machines, the granularity and scheduling that Impero afforded was just the ticket, the free WOL programs were a bit less user friendly.

 

I just wanted something that was easy to set up and configure and use that would turn on and off a subset of machines (the majority but not like teacher office / admin machines etc).

[unixman_again]

We just have a cron job running on each PC to shut it down at 10:00pm. I think this is far to late but it is to take into account the annual open evening. We use WOF (wake up on finger).

[Jcx500]

using impero to schedule wake up and shut down

[ThatBoringBloke]

Is PDQ Deploy decent value for edu? I assume you use this instead of SCCM for your machines software too?

 

Thanks

 

at £350 a year for a single admin licence installed onto a server its great vfm.

 

yes I use it rather than sccm, its so much simpler and easier to use.

[thimon]

How many machines do you have? My main concern is I have ~500+ machines churning through electricity over night every night for no reason, if not for the cost implications, the environmental ones are enough that I will have to give it a decent look.

 

Appreciate your feedback though

We shutdown all machines at 8pm, with no WOL in place. If users want the machines on they can use the on button!

[dobbyit]

Can a task be done using NetSupport to shutdown XYZ computers, or is there a script I can use with Gpo

[KevinB]

Impero is working just fine here on Windows 10. The only issue we have is wakeup for a few older Dell desktops where they don't have a proper Windows 10 driver but use a generic one. They do a BIOS wake up instead but shutdown still works. Everything else wakes and shuts down just as it did with Windows 7.

[CharlesGreig]

Impero is working just fine here on Windows 10. The only issue we have is wakeup for a few older Dell desktops where they don't have a proper Windows 10 driver but use a generic one. They do a BIOS wake up instead but shutdown still works. Everything else wakes and shuts down just as it did with Windows 7.

 

Is it hibernating or actually turning off? Like, if you look on your c: do you have hiberfil.sys? When you turn off hibernate Impero wouldn't do it according to the guy I was talking too (though I was a little sceptical).

 

I will speak to them again though if its working for you and not using hibernate?

[KevinB]

Sorry, missed the hibernate part

 

Yes, ours hibernate, but that only uses up about 1.6 GB on our machines. Even our PCs with 110 GB SSDs seem fine with that.

[DrBeaker]

I've read posts where apparently Windows 10 doesn't support WoL any more?

 

We've got it working on Windows 10 on various bits of kit.

 

Dells - no issues

HPs - Had to downgrade the ethernet driver to get WoL to work and change some settings.

 

We just use the RM CC4 console. One place we had Impero the WoL was very spotty.

[sparkeh]

This explains the situation with Win 10 and WOL:

 

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2776718/wake-on-lan-wol-behavior-in-windows-8-windows-8-1-and-windows-10

[CHiLL]

We don't have any issues with Impero's WOL and Windows 10. It's worked fine for us in all version from our first Windows 10 deployment of 1607 back in 2016 to 1909 that we're on now. The only issues I've come up against are that WOL isn't enabled on the client, whether it's disabled in the BIOS or the network card has it turned off in Windows.

[MartinT]

Group Policy to shut them all down at 22:00 when all but the senior students have gone to bed. BIOS set to wake them up at 07:00.

 

This ensures that they apply their updates daily.

[DrBeaker]

Group Policy to shut them all down at 22:00 when all but the senior students have gone to bed. BIOS set to wake them up at 07:00.

 

This ensures that they apply their updates daily.

Did you set a scheduled shutdown task from group policy then? Across all computers or just certain OUs?

[MartinT]

Did you set a scheduled shutdown task from group policy then? Across all computers or just certain OUs?

 

Yes, just for the OUs of the classroom and suite PCs. Otherwise it would annoy, say, teachers working late at night

[DrBeaker]

Yes, just for the OUs of the classroom and suite PCs. Otherwise it would annoy, say, teachers working late at night

 

How have you done that then of of interest? Just set it to run if nobody is logged on? Otherwise wouldn't it shutdown every machine in a classroom. e.g. we have an OU per classroom with one computer in some of them. So it would shut them down too surely, if the classroom OUs has been set as a target? I'm just curious.

[Boredguy]

We use powershell to do the end of day shutdown's (we run it twice) and run it from one of our servers.

 

Around 6pm it goes though the list of workstations, pings them to check if they are on, then checks if there is anyone logged on to the PC.

If someone is logged on it gives them a warning message then starts the shutdown process. This gives them at least 60 seconds to save documents, and as we normally run this when our site is due to be locked up it rarely affects anyone.

If the PC is turned off, then it jumps on to the next station.

 

We then run the script again around 10pm, but this time it will do shutdown regardless if a user is logged on or not, as by this point any evening activities on site would be over.