Wake On LAN is now available
We now have a web page which can wake sleeping computers. It should wake most of our desktop machines (though not HP 7900 computers – see below).
You can find it at wake.inf.ed.ac.uk.
It seems a bad idea to let anyone on the internet wake any of our computers, so there are
a few restrictions:
- When you visit wake.inf you will be prompted for your DICE credentials (unless you are using a DICE machine, as they do the authentication automatically).
- The page only lists those machines which you have permission to wake up. Most people should already have permission to wake computers which are allocated to them, but if yours is not listed, contact Computing Support and ask to be able to wake it. Similarly if you want other people to be able to wake your machines, just ask for this to be done. Feel free to ask for groups of people to be able to wake a number of machines.
At the moment HP 7900 DICE computers have had to be excluded from the service, since they react extraordinarily badly when they receive a Wake On LAN signal. We hope that that problem will be overcome in time with software updates, not least because my own DICE machine is a 7900…
The wake-up service is also documented here. Documentation for sleep on DICE is here.
One last point: your DICE machine will not automatically sleep until you logout, so please consider logging out at least before a weekend.
Chris.
For other people with self-managed linux machines like mine:
On my self-managed (Ubuntu 11.10) machine, this is how I suspend or hibernate my machine from the command-line:
dbus-send –print-reply –system –dest=org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend
OR
dbus-send –print-reply –system –dest=org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Hibernate
Despite having one of the badly-behaved HP machines, I can wake mine up fine. Hibernate might work slightly more robustly, but either way the machine on rare occasions doesn’t wake up. If I will *really* need access to the machine before I next physically come in, I currently won’t hibernate it “just in case”.