Hello. In order to make sure our client pc's are updated via windows update, I need to make sure pc's are powered up friday afternoon (when deepfreeze goes into maintanance). In order to do so I thought to use wolcmd.exe, which however requires me to know the mac address of any given client I need booted.

I don't feel any urgent need to go do an ipconfig on all pc's manually, and I don't feel like constantly pinging any address in the dhcp pool to find active pcs. Therefore I'm looking for a piece of software that can run continuously, and lists mac addresses along with netbios names in some kind of plain text file I can manipulate. Or any other piece of software that doesn't need to be run manually every time I want to update the start script.

Would prefer if whatever software to accomplish this would run on windows, but I can install a linux as well.

Formerly known as Ethereal:

http://www.wireshark.org/

tried that for an hour or so, and just ain't smart enough to get it working the way I want.
Can you tell me some command line parameters that work?

I used deepfreeze at my previous job and they had a 'console' program that detected client computers w\ deepfreeze installed. When you opened it up it would show you different client groups and whether or not they were frozen, on or off... etc.

I didn't get access to this for a while.... i can't tell you how big of an improvement it was to going from computer to computer unfreezing each of almost 50 computers one by one.... then having to refreeze them... or rethaw them if something wasn't right !!!

the console isn't always bliss though! our deepfreeze runs on a virtual wsus server, and every time you try using the built in wol feature, it'll freeze up and load the virtual network card as much as possible .... at least with our version

What about using a port scanner like nmap/zenmap? You wouldn't have to do a full port scan but could execute a ping sweep and get the information relatively quickly. You could create a batch or shell script and use scheduled tasks/cron to run the job regularly.

http://nmap.org/

haven't seen nmap, there is a program called languard that can search out pc's and give you stats like open ports, ip, mac, etc.

google gfi languard

I know some switches will show the mac address of what is connected to it. Also depending on your PCs some will have a setting in the BIOS to start up automatically at a certain time. I know that I've set my PCs to boot at 1:30 so they can be unfrozen and updated.

The problem with using bios for booting is, that almost no bios is able to boot at different times each day. You can set your bios to boot at a certain time every day. At least that's what I've seen in the hp's were using.

Anyhow, I'll figure out a way to run a tcpdump with whatever switches are needed to get exactly what I need.