Introducing Wake On Lan for Display Clients

The next article in the run up to releasing 1.4 will look at the new Wake On Lan (WOL) feature of Xibo.

[](/content/images/2012/05/wol-edit-display.jpg)

There has been a lot of interest over the years Xibo has been running for a solution to be “green”, “save power” and generally not have the Xibo display screen solution on unnecessarily. The Xibo project has been very keen to put these things in place, and 1.4 will contain a number of measures to make these wishes a reality.

The WOL function is intended to be used for display clients that are addressable by the server, by this we mean that there has to be a clear addressable network route between the server and the client that needs to wake up. It is also required that WOL is turned on in any necessary settings on the client PC.

The WOL configuration happens on a display by display basis from the Edit Display form. Each display has new settings for:

• Enable Wake On LAN – (Turn WOL on/off for the display)
• Wake On LAN Time – (Specify a time for this display to wake, using the 24 hr clock)
• BroadCast Address – (The BroadCast address of the client, if unknown use the IP address and fill in the CIDR field)
• Wake On LAN Secure On – (The SecureOn password for the client, if supported)
• Wake On LAN CIDR – (The CIDR subnet mask, if the BroadCast Address is unknown)

Once the display has these settings it can be woken up in 2 ways:

Wake On LAN Now

[](/content/images/2012/05/wol-wakenow-button.jpg)

Each display has the “Wake On LAN” button which can be used to send a wake on LAN command on demand. Clicking the button displays a form for confirmation, once this is pressed the command is send immediately to the client.

Wake On LAN Time – Maintenance Script

In addition to the WOL now function, the Xibo maintenance module has been altered to send a WOL packet to any display which has a “Wake On LAN Time” specified. It will only send the command once, as the time window is passed.

The maintenance script has to be running for this to work correctly. Maintenance instructions can be found on the wiki.

Putting the client to sleep

There are a few different options for putting the client to sleep – such as a scheduled task. However, the next article in this series will look at an option built into Xibo. The “Shell Command” module.

We hope you will find this new functionality useful! As always comments are always welcome over on Launchpad Answers.