ARD not waking sleeping clients?

Question

Level 2

264 points

ARD not waking sleeping clients?

I have ARD (3.6.1) running on one of my OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2) admin machines and I'm having an issue where I can't wake sleeping machines, via ARD, on the LAN.

I'm building Lion and Mountain Lion "base images" for scaled deployment and I'd like to set them so that they go to sleep after X amount of time. But, for whatever reason, ARD can't wait these machines once they go to sleep. I've never found ARD very consistent on how it does WOL, but I was hoping that with clean installations of both Lion and Mountain Lion (up-to-date per OS), with up-to-date ARD clients, with client machines set to "Wake for Ethernet network access", etc., that it would finally work properly. But, I just can't get ARD to wake these sleeping machines.

Does anyone have any suggestions on why this might be happening? I rely on ARD for remoate management of all Macs I manage (for end-user support, maintenance, etc.) so I need to be able to "connect" to these machine. And without WOL working properly, I have to set our machines to never go to sleep (which is really annoying).

So, if anyone has any suggestions, it'd be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Kristin.

Posted on Feb 1, 2013 11:17 AM

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Answer 1

varjak paw

Level 10

170,206 points

Feb 1, 2013 11:20 AM in response to kristin.

Are these workstations on the same subnet as your administrator system, or on different subnets? If they're on different subnets, that's most likely at least part of the problem. WOL uses Directed Broadcast, something most network administrators turn off in their routers to cut down chatter on the network. You might ask your network admin about this.

Regards.

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Answer 2

kristin. Author

Level 2

264 points

Feb 1, 2013 11:25 AM in response to varjak paw

I am the network admin. 8)

And yes, they're on the same subnet. I'm actually setting them up via ARD. But, once they go to sleep, I have to walk over to the machines and physically wake them. I've just never had any luck with WOL working consistantly with ARD. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

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Answer 3

varjak paw

Level 10

170,206 points

Feb 1, 2013 11:45 AM in response to kristin.

That's been my experience as well; sometimes it just doesn't work. There were a couple of utiltiies that were somewhat more reliable, working via the MAC address of the workstation. This one still exists:

http://software.doogul.com/wom/

and may be worth a try.

Regards.

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Answer 4

kristin. Author

Level 2

264 points

Feb 1, 2013 11:52 AM in response to varjak paw

Yea, I have an old router that I have Tomato installed on just for performing WOL (which is does very well). It doesn't do anything but WOL. It's just annoying to have to log into this box just to wake a machine, when this is something that ARD should be able to do as a basic function (as you kinda need to wake a machine if you want to work on it). I guess they just assume people leave their machines on 24/7...

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Answer 5

varjak paw

Level 10

170,206 points

Feb 1, 2013 12:05 PM in response to kristin.

That's what I ended up doing when I had to manage remote workstations, just leaving them awake. Or setting them to sleep only at night and wake up automatically in the morning (you can do this with pmset or a utility such as Faronics' PowerSave). ARD, while useful, just has never been particularly reliable.

Regards.

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Answer 6

TeenTitan

Level 4

2,640 points

Feb 6, 2013 10:42 PM in response to kristin.

I found Understanding Sleep Proxy Service useful in troubleshooting some of the sleep/wake issues I was expeirncing. Perhaps it might be informative / useful for you.

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