How do you..

[Admiral Huddy]

schedule a PC to come on at a certain time.

I need to schedule Arconis to backup data between two machines. Although Arconis has the ability to wake up the local PC it can't (as far as I'm aware) start the remote networked PC and visa versa. The timing of the power up on both PCs need to identical but this is unlikely. I'm not sure theat the Arcnis backup will retry a certain amount of time before giving up.


Any help would be appreciated.

[Daz]

You can normally specify a switch on time in the BIOS, though it would happen every day unless they've improved that feature somewhat.

Your best bet would be wake on LAN if the remote machine supports it. If Acronis has an option to run a script/command before backup, then you could stick something there, or if not you could make a scheduled task to run at boot time, though obviously every time you started that machine, the other one would fire.

[Davey_Pitch]

Could you put both machines into standby, then have scheduler wake them up to perform the backup?

[Admiral Huddy]

Could you put both machines into standby, then have scheduler wake them up to perform the backup?

can this be done easily enough?

[Daz]

http://dwuk.net/misc/wakeup.PNG

Yep. Although I've never had the need to try it.

[Admiral Huddy]

Cheers Daz,

I'm not sure this is going to help because I have to run the schedule specfied in Arcnonis. Besides Arconis has the facility to wake the PC anyway but the problem here is timing. If one PC boots before the other and one attempts to send before the other has fnished booting then i'm not sure if Arconis will wait for a specific amount of time or attempts before it gives up.

[Mark]

Synchronise clocks with a reliable time source (windows XP has that feature built-in), and set one to wake a minute (or two) before the other. Easy. :)

[Admiral Huddy]

I'll have to give it a test.

[Desmo]

I'd get the second machine on 5 minutes before the backup starts. Shouldn't be any problems with timing then. Either just set some task to wake the machine or just use the BIOS power on settings, although as Daz says, these can be quite limited.

[Daz]

I'd be looking to do it all from the one machine. Create a scheduled task that wakes the source machine up, that task runs a script which wakes the target up, waits a few minutes, calls Acronis, waits for it to finish, and then shuts down both machines. Shouldn't be that hard to do, so long as the computers have reasonably up to date BIOS's and support all the necessary ACPI gumph.

[Admiral Huddy]

I'd be looking to do it all from the one machine. Create a scheduled task that wakes the source machine up, that task runs a script which wakes the target up, waits a few minutes, calls Acronis, waits for it to finish, and then shuts down both machines. Shouldn't be that hard to do, so long as the computers have reasonably up to date BIOS's and support all the necessary ACPI gumph.

Mm that sounds like what I need to do.. I can then get Arconis to run it's sheduled backup when it starts..

Don't suppouse you have any pointers for those scripts by any chance?

[Daz]

Well, doing it in VBScript would be easier, but it should be possible in a batch script. Working backwards, XP already has a command for local and remote shutdown (called 'shutdown' oddly enough), if Acronis runs scheduled it would just be a case of copying and pasting the command from the task it creates and calling it with "start /wait 'c:\program files\acronis\blah blah' " in a batch script. You'll need a basic 'wait' or 'sleep' application (you can find 'sleep' in UnxUtils (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/), and its as easy as 'sleep 5' to wait 5 seconds), and last but not least something to do the wake on lan - something like this (http://www.matcode.com/wol.htm) perhaps.

Rough mockup (this wont work):

@echo off
REM Wake up the target
MC-WOL 00:22:33:AA:DD:EE

REM Wait a couple of minutes
sleep 120

REM Start Acronis and wait for it to finish
start /wait 'C:\Program Files\Acronis\Acronis.exe some arguments here'

REM We're done, so shutdown the target - needs a valid IP address
shutdown -s -f -t 05 -m \\192.168.1.5

REM And finally, shutdown this machine
shutdown -s -f -t 05

REM Finished
exit

You could expand it with error checking/handling and such (is the remote machine awake, if not try and wake it again, wait another 2 minutes and check again, if not then terminate script and email an error somewhere - for instance), but that's much easier in VB than it is a shell script. In Windows anyway.

[Admiral Huddy]

That's great cheers Daz, appears to be simple enough.. I'll give that a bash later.. Oh damn I'm packing haha..

Actually, I think I remember that Acrconis can run a script before running the scheduled job.. I'll have to check. If that's the cae, I can just jun a delay or sleep for 5 minutes before the backups start.

:)