As you may be aware I have a 7 CPU folding farm in my office. However most people leave work after me and despite my pleading they turn their PC's off because they dont see the point in folding

So, bearing in mind that after some testing I know the text-only service starts before log-on, I was considering setting a the bios to "wake on LAN" at about 8pm to start the folding.

However, is a simple "ping" from my machine (on 24/7) going to be enough to wake the other machines?

Any other ideas welcome.

No - you have to send the 'magic packet' which is something like the MAC address of the card repeated 6 times!?

I Dont know all the ins and outs as im trying to get it to work myself - but rest assured it's nowhere near as simple as it seems!

Update:

I've enabled Wake-On-Lan (WOL) on the target machine, the WOL packet woke the machine up on the first attempt but now it doesnt work :( The command I'm using is exactly the same yet it doesnt work :(

Yup, as dave said, you need a "magic packet". Type in the MAC address of the NIC of the PC you want to wake up and it will make up.

IIRC, the technology was developped by AMD (of course, there are two AMD we know of and both make computer chips of some description :P).

I have the app at home on my PC. I can host or attach it if you can't find one, but a google should reveal

As you may be aware I have a 7 CPU folding farm in my office. However most people leave work after me and despite my pleading they turn their PC's off because they dont see the point in folding

So' date=' bearing in mind that after some testing I know the text-only service starts before log-on, I was considering setting a the bios to "wake on LAN" at about 8pm to start the folding.

However, is a simple "ping" from my machine (on 24/7) going to be enough to wake the other machines?

Any other ideas welcome.[/quote']

Go into the biosd of the machines you want to start up and set a start up time. Say they all go home at 6. Set the bios to turn the pc on every day at 6:30 or 7:00pm. This way they will automatically turn on.

I used to use this for my pc at home so it's booted up when I get in from work

I've found I can easily wake the NEC branded machines remotely, they should have turned on at 8pm this evening. I tested them a couple of times this afternoon and it worked easily.

However, the Advent branded machine still refused to wake despite its first success.