Help with Scripting bios settings
Hi
Ok I have to patch our estate with a fair amount of Critical Patches.
this obviously needs to be done at night, but I can't patch if the pc's are off and I can't trust our user base to leave their pc's on when requested.
So I have to run a Wake on Lan scheduel, prior to the Patch scheduel, to make sure the Pc's in the label I deply the patches to are online and awake.
However I have hit another snag. the Bios of the machines includes a setting for which day of the week, or which hour of the day the systems will accept Wake on Lan requests and these settings are disabled as default.
So now I need to run a schedueled script that changes these bios settings to enabled..
Help???
Regards
Ok I have to patch our estate with a fair amount of Critical Patches.
this obviously needs to be done at night, but I can't patch if the pc's are off and I can't trust our user base to leave their pc's on when requested.
So I have to run a Wake on Lan scheduel, prior to the Patch scheduel, to make sure the Pc's in the label I deply the patches to are online and awake.
However I have hit another snag. the Bios of the machines includes a setting for which day of the week, or which hour of the day the systems will accept Wake on Lan requests and these settings are disabled as default.
So now I need to run a schedueled script that changes these bios settings to enabled..
Help???
Regards
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Posted by:
cblake
14 years ago
Can you tell us what machine types you are dealing with? Many of the large OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo) provide BIOS management tools that allow admins to distribute settings like enabling WOL or setting boot priority.
Posted by:
jkatkace
14 years ago
Or if they don't provide tools, they'll provide a WMI extensions library which makes changing BIOS accessible from vbscript.
So, there are multiple ways of approaching the problem, depending on what access to the BIOS the vendor provides from the operating system.
So, there are multiple ways of approaching the problem, depending on what access to the BIOS the vendor provides from the operating system.
Posted by:
airwolf
14 years ago
this obviously needs to be done at night
Not necessarily, unless for political reasons. The KBOX can trickle packages down to remote distribution points at a throttled rate if you have multiple sites. You can also prompt users with a warning message before and after installation - if you use a timeout, you can automatically install if the user is away from their desk. You can also supress a reboot with most installations. If you must use the WOL solution, you'll have to write your own program in a language that can utilize WMI - AutoIT, VBScript, and many others are capable.
Posted by:
MACSnow
14 years ago
ORIGINAL: Closie
However I have hit another snag. the Bios of the machines includes a setting for which day of the week, or which hour of the day the systems will accept Wake on Lan requests and these settings are disabled as default.
So now I need to run a schedueled script that changes these bios settings to enabled..
Help???
Regards
Just to note that what I've seen on Intel MBs is a setting that turns the PC on at a scheduled
time. Are you sure this setting restricts WOL by time? That seems a little odd.
You definitely want to try a few PCs manually and test, test, test before you automate the BIOS setup.
It seems to be a bit of an art to get WOL working well.
Regards,
Rich
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