I have a question regarding Wake on Lan. I need to wake up PC's through the internet (different subnets). However, these machines would not be having any IP addresses as they would be fresh out of the box and we need to wake them up remotely through the network so that they can connect to our deployment server and we can reimage them remotely. There are certain WOL softwares available which we can use to send magic packets to a different subnet. However we cannot configure our routers to enable broadcast traffic due to security reasons. So we cannot take that approach.
I was wondering if there are any appliance devices or something like cell phones which we can use for Wake on LAN. If you guys have any ideas, suggestions about how to use wake on LAN using other devices like cell phones or something, please share it with me.
If you don't find anything like what you're seeking, you might use something like remote desktop to broadcast the magic packets from a machine (that's, say, setup to autostart at a certain time every day) on that same subnet, rather than allowing the directed broadcasts through the firewall/router to the subnet.
Thanks for your reply Darr. Actually remote desktops may not be a good option for us as we are looking for is something cheap. Are there any telephone controllers available in the market which can turn on a computer through a phone.? There are controllers available for electrical appliances but not sure if it will work to turn on computers. Anybody has used something like this before where we can turn on the computer using a phone?
Some BIOS have a setting (usually in the Power options) to control how the computer reacts to the power cycling... typically you can choose between 'stay off' (or disabled), 'resume previous state' or 'turn on' (enabled). If these computers you want to control can be set to automatically power up (the 'turn on' or enabled option) under those conditions, I can see a switch like that working to tell them to power up... the switch monitors the phone line, and when it rings a preset number of times it cycles power to a realy that switches a power receptacle off and then back on after so many seconds.
Ya I got our point darr247. Sorry had a long day lol. Yes you are right for these kind of switches to remotely boot up computer, the BIOS should be configured to control how the computer reacts to power cycling. Unfortunately we are talking about Lenovo laptops here and I could not find any kind of this setting in the power options of the BIOS :((
