Setup and config of WOL4SBS2008

Posted by o.sommer

At www.SBStools.com we provide a SBS addon tool (aka WOL4SBS2008) that allows you to wake up your powered down or sleeping office computers using Small Business Servers remote portal website “Remote Web Workplace” (RWW).

This helps you to become greener and actually save a lot money on energy and will slow down wear of your computers, because now you  can shutdown your computers when leaving the office and wake them up remotely if you need them!

Doing the math here on potential energy savings:

One Computer running 24 hours x 365 days equals 8760 hours of runtime per year.
A Computer usually consumes about 50 Watt (0,05 kW) of power in average, which makes that 438 kW per year.
Multiplied by the current cost of energy in Germany of about 20cents per kW that summs up to 87,60 EUR per year.

If you count on 20 work days per month and 8h shifts, then a typical computer would really only need to be on about 1920 hours per year at a cost of 19,20 EUR.

So the potential savings here on energy alone are 87,60-19,20 = 68,40 EUR per computer per year!

So if you are able to shutdown just one computer than after less than two years the tools costs are already returned just by energy savings.
If you can shutdown two or more computers your savings would go up dramatically, for example if you run 5 computers this tool can easily safe you 342 EUR per year, not including additional savings you can achieve for example by been able to turn on power saving profiles so that the computer can go to sleep when not been used for a while even during office hours.

On the technical side we use so called Magicpackets also known as WakeOnLAN (WOL) Broadcasts to trigger the WOL capabilities that almost every integrated and addon networkcard supports.

First you need to get the installation package from our website (SBStools.com):

Than just open and run the setup.exe file to begin the installation:

The setup wizard is quite simple to follow:

click next

agree to the license terms and click next

only change the folder and user settings if really needed

That’s basically all you need to do to install the tool to your server, so click next to start copying and setup.

To allow changes to the system you might need to allow these on the “User Account Control” prompt:

Install than performs some copying and other setup operations:

Now to get WOL functions into the RWW you now need to start the configuration tool of WOL4SBS2008

on first start the config tool automatically asks you to request a free 60 day trial version or to enter your serial (for purchase on SBStools.com):

you will be asked for an emailadress. This emailadress wil lonly be used for trial activation and will be verifyed with an email we send to this adress that includes an online actvation link you need to click to activat your trial:

click “Request/Activate Temporary License” to at first send the email

and after you activated the trial by browsing (clicking) the link in the email we send to you

After successfull verification you can proceed at the trialcheck of the config tool:

If your config tool comes up empty as mine just did, you need to now the path of SBS 2008 RWW which by default is:
C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Bin\webapp

Also you should enter the SBS 2008 Servers IP into the DHCP Server IP Address field.

So that fully filled in it should something like this:

now clikc on Save Settings and acknowledge the service restart warning (you can stop and start that service on the “resolver service” sheet here:

You should also change the setting to actually reflect your actuall IP adress range and turn off diagnose logging as soon as you checked that the wake on LAN technologie works in your setup:

Hit “Save Settings” here to apply the changes and than restart the service using the stop and start service button.

Now click ”integrate” on the first page of the config tool to modify the RWW webpages to show the “turn on Computer” and other buttons:

Now when you logon to RWW you get the new WOL features on the “computer list”:

The “turn on computer” and “send ping” buttons (here shown in german") are now usable:

Clicking on “turn on computer” now should return to the RWW homepage and write a green text on the  right hand side of the page just below the “view help” text like this:

now the computer should turn on and boot. After how long ever it takes your computer to boot you should be able to than go to the computer list again and connect to the computer. You can check if the computer is already turned on by using the “send ping” button:

which will return a red text if the computer is not available

and a green text if the computer already responds to pings:

 

Hope this helps and you enjoy your WakeOnLAN enabled SBS 2008 RWW.

As said before: The tool is available for purchase on www.SBSTools.com .

Tags: WakeOnLAN, WOL, WOL4RWW, WOL4SBS2008, SBS2008, MagicPaket, UDP, Braodcast
Categories: 2008 | AddIn | Green | Hardware | Portal | RWA | RWW | Remote Desktop | SBS 2008 | Terminalserver | WOL4SBS2008
E-mail | Kick it! | Permalink | Comments (0) | 1/24/2012 1:21:09 PM