Applied Computer Systems

What Is SoftLINK Power Management?

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Summary
With SoftLINK Power Management, not only can you reboot computers remotely but you can also can power them on and power them off remotely!

Details
Powering On – To power on a SoftLINK Client, SoftLINK issues a UDP Broadcast ‘Magic Packet’ onto the network. When this is received by the Wake up on LAN Network Interface Card (NIC) that has the same MAC address as the packet, the NIC issues a command to the power supply of the machine to switch it on.

Powering Off – To power Off a SoftLINK Client machine, a Windows operating system instructions is sent to the Operating system to shutdown the machine.

Issues
To use SoftLINK’s Power On Client function, the Client machine must have a Wake-on-LAN card installed. Most new network cards have this feature but it is worth double checking. In order to use SoftLINK’s Power On Client function, the SoftLINK Tutor must know the MAC Address of the SoftLINK Client to be powered on. This information is obtained when the Tutor connects to a Client for the first time and the information is stored in the Client properties on the Tutor’s machine.

If the Client (or you, the Tutor) disables reboot, then power management is also disabled. Some operating systems do not support power management, but in some cases, an update to provide this functionality is available.

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