I just stumbled across "Lights Out" which appears to be a very cool WOL (Wake-on-LAN) addin for WHS, it's available from the German WHS blog -
www.home-server-blog.de. I installed it about half an hour ago and so far so good.
It was a snap to set up except for the fiddly process required to disable sbscrexe.exe (SB Core Service) in WHS. If this service isn't disabled, it will over-ride the Lights Out's main benefit because the sbscrexe.exe service wakes up Windows Home Server every 30 minutes and Lights Out cannot prevent this - so until Microsoft releases an official patch you'll have to disable this process manually.
The excellent (PDF) instructions provided with Lights Out give you a link to a
forum post over at
www.speedguide.net which steps you through things however you'll need to download and install MS's "
Process Explorer" to be able to kill the process off permanently.
As part of the install, Lights Out adds a new folder to the WHS "Software" folder called "Lights Out". Inside this folder, the installer adds an executable file which is then run on each of the client PCs which use WHS for backups etc. This installs a new service on the client which is designed to send a wol magic packet to the server every time the client is started or comes out of standby.
What's it about?
Lights Out is used to put a Windows Home Server into suspended mode or hibernation and resume on user defined events.
Description
To go to sleep, you can choose from several methods:
• On demand, if no more clients are active
• Based on a calendar, as a single action or repeated each weekday
• Or as a combination of both methodsYou can define times, where the server has to be up and running:
• Using the calendar
• Based on the defined backup time
Wake up
A suspended or hibernated server can be resumed using a calendar event. You can also install a small application on your client machines to wake up your server when needed.
Additional functionality
The Add-In visualises the uptime of your client machines, your server and the backup time so you can easily identify the machine which puts the server into sleep.
Data integrity
To reduce the risk of data loss, the server is never put into sleep during an active backup operation or a backup cleanup. You can define services, which are stopped on suspend and restarted after resume. The DriveExtenderMigrator always belongs to this list of services. Additional services like a mail server can be added.
Downloads
Lights Out Version 0.7.0
LightsOutInstaller0.7.0.67.msi
English documentation
LighstOutEn.pdf
German documentation
LightsOutDe.pdf
Support (English) -
We Got Served Forum
Support (German) -
Home Server Forum
Author
Martin Rothschink
source:
www.home-server-blog.de
