How do you..

[Admiral Huddy]

Originally Posted by 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.

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, 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 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.