Hi,
We are trying to set up our deployments in sccm 2012 to wake up pc out off hours to install software and for the most part this works, however the problem we have is that if for whatever reason a pc doesn't get woken up (no power plugged in, no network connectivity etc) it will not get the software and will not be woken up again by system center. The only way we can make this happen is by changing the deployment available time or the install deadline, as this seems to trigger sccm to send out wake up packets again. The problem we have with this is that all pc's will wake up again even though there is nothing to be installed on them, so potentially we would have 50 pc's wake up just so 1 or 2 pc's can install some software.
For example, we want to install java out of hours so we have a deployment targeting a "java installed" collection and the deployment is set to send wake up packets. We schedule it to be available at 11pm and the deadline to be as soon as possible. When the app becomes available, system center will send out the wake up packets and any pc's that can wake up will wake up and install the software with out causing any hassle to our users. Now, some pc's won't wake up for whatever reason and therefore won't install the software, the user will come in and turn there pc on as normal and then the computer agent will realise that it needs java and try and install it. This means that we could end up with error messages coming up because the user has a browser window open or even worse the browser window could close unexpectedly and lose any work the user was doing. We can't have this happen so we would implement a maintenance window to stop this, now the problem would be that come the start of the maintenance window that evening, the pc will be turned off but system center won't wake the machine up because the deadline has passed. We would also run into this problem when adding a new machine to the collection, wol won't work because the deadline has passed.
Is there something we are missing here as it seems the wol functionality in system center is very dum and doesn't recognise non compliant machines?
Thanks