"Wake on LAN" support

[robertdana]

It's a waste of power to leave desktop machines on overnight with power-saving features disabled so that backups can happen reliably. It should be unnnecessary, and Retrospect could implement a relatively minor new feature to enable it for those customers who wanted to put machines to sleep.

 

Most network cards these days support the "Wake on LAN" feature, which allows for a computer to be woken up by network activity. There are two "wake on lan" settings:

 

1. Wake computer up for *any* network activity: useless in most networks, as there's usually enough activity to keep a computer awake continuously

2. Only wake up if requested by a "management workstation"

 

This latter feature is interesting, because it allows you to "wake up" a computer by sending a "magic packet" to it... there are numerous free utilities available on the Internet which will generate such a packet.

 

My request for Retrospect is to include a checkmark in client settings to send a "wake on lan" packet before attempting to wake the client up. There are some complexities to this... retrospect would have to remember the client's ethernet MAC address, but it seems doable.

 

As a fall back, I'd really like to see a change to the way scripting works... I've tried using external scripting to achieve the above by sending a "magic packet" to a system on the "startsource" event, but the problem is that "startsource" is invoked *after* client discovery, which fails if the client is asleep. It would be really helpful if "startsource" were triggered before attempting to contact the client, or if a new event "startclient" were defined to meet this need.

 

Thanks

-Robert