Wake on lan/force shutdown
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I support various training centres who like to
- Switch all the computers on in the morning and
- Switch them off again at the end of the day.
The group of computers would be all the non-admin computers so it would be ok for them to be forced shutdown.
I think I could do this without fog by the following:-
[LIST]
[]maintain a list of mac addresses and IPs for the groups of PCs
[]php web page calls scripts:-
[LIST]
[*](switch on) To send a wol packet to each mac address
* To send a net rpc SHUTDOWN message to each IP
[/LIST]
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However, it seems that most of this is already built into Fog… I can immediately see that I’d need to use a different authentication schema at first, because these tutors don’t need any functionality related to imaging. So I would just have a basic authentication restriction via htaccess, and then write a page that will allow:[LIST]
[]Firstly the user to select the group name
[]Two buttons one to switch on and the other to force switch off all computers in that group.
[/LIST]
If possible this would be restricted to groups that begin with a prefix of some sort so that I could restrict which groups are shown in the list and therefore that are permitted to be switched on and shut down in that way.Questions:
[LIST]
[]Would this be useful to anyone else?
[]Can anyone tell me some tips on how to achieve this?
[]What are the key components I’d have to understand? I have a good general knowledge of programming and Linux
[]What would be the hardest part of this do you think?
[*]Would it actually be practical to create a new type of user, and add sections to the Fog gui for their use?
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bump
To be honest I’m only looking for a few tips so that I can start nosing around and trying to put together a frankenmod here rather than looking for a feature- although it would be really nice…
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Just a thought, if you create a group in FOG and move all the PC’s you want into it. Then you could make a batch file with “shutdown /s /f /t 0” and save it as shutdown.cmd. Then you can upload that file as a snap-in to fog. Lastly, if you shut the computers down at a certain time at night everyday, you should be able to set the schedule the file to run using the Cron execution through FOG. Just a thought, i’ve never tried it, so I don’t know the results.
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Hi Kevin,
I tried it but it wasn’t very reliable with my windows XP boxen. I just found that the snap-in did not respond quickly enough, or at all in some cases. I am soon going to be installing zentyal with samba4 at which point I will probably open the firewall and look at running psexec or something like that and see if I can’t find a workaround somehow.
Thanks for the tip.
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If you have the FOG Client installed on the workstations, you can specify sleep/shutdown times.