ePowerSaver - A Computer Power Saving Solution for Your Organization

Wake on LAN (WoL) support is implemented on the motherboard of a computer and the network interface, and as such, is not dependent on the operating system running on the hardware.

Wake on LAN must be enabled in the Power Management section of a PC motherboard's BIOS setup utility. It may also be necessary to configure the computer to reserve power for the network card when the system is shut down.

In order to "wake up" the computer device from hibernation or standby, "magic packets" need to be sent to its MAC address.

The Magic packets are sent via the data link or OSI-2 layer, which is not secure and can be used or abused by anyone on the same LAN. Firewalls may prevent clients within the public WAN from accessing the broadcast address of the private LAN. (Abuse of the WoL feature only allows computers to be switched on; it does not in itself bypass password and other forms of security.)

The computer being woken does not have the knowledge of where the wakeup signal comes from. If the magic packet can be made to reach a computer, it can originate anywhere (e.g., from the Internet)

The ePowerSaver is not interfering the use of WOL via other means and its configuration is also not conflicting with WOL configurations. In order to encourage the use of WOL to save computer idle energy, it has provided a useful extention to support and automate the use of WOL.

ePowerSaver has a build in feature which can send the magic packet to specified MAC address of your computer. When the listening computer receives this packet, the network card checks the packet for the correct information. If the magic packet is valid, the network card takes the computer out of hibernation or standby, or starts it up.

ePowerSaver is scriptable. System Administrator can script it to perform WOL task.

Alternative, you can rely on ePowerSaver to automate and schedule the WOL tasks.

ePowerSaver has a build in feature which can send the magic packet to specified MAC address of your computer. When the listening computer receives this packet, the network card checks the packet for the correct information. If the magic packet is valid, the network card takes the computer out of hibernation or standby, or starts it up.

For example, we can perform the WOL task using the ePowerSaver demo, a lightweight version of the ePowerSaver. In order to wake computer with MAC address of "00-17-42-B7-18-BB", we can issue following command from the DOS prompt:

For those who prefer to perform the system management task using script, the good news is that ePowerSaver is scriptable. Even the demo version of WOL can be very helpful for this purpose, if you would like to using script to automaticaly wake up all the computers in you LAN.

1. Write a simple script to collect all the computers in your LAN by query AD server

2. Write a simple script to lookup MAC address of those computer in your list

3. Write a simple script to call ePowerSaver and pass the MAC address as parameter, and ePowerSaver will be sending the special packets to wake the computer automatically.

Alternative, you can rely on ePowerSaver to automate and schedule the WOL tasks.