Nir Sofer has just released a new tool to assist network and system administrators in those tasks. When you first start the WakeMeOnLan tool it scans the computer network automatically. The portable program identifies all connected devices, collects their network addresses and saves the information to a file.

The computers are also displayed in the application interface, along with their local IP address, computer name if set, MAC address, network adapter information and status.

The saved list can then later be used to select computers that are either turned off or in standby to turn them on again.

WakeMeOnLan can be run on all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system, from Windows 2000 all the way to the latest client and server versions of Windows (at the time of writing Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2).

The remote computers need to support the Wake On Lan feature. It also needs to be noted that this works only on wired networks and not wireless networks.

On some computers, Wake on Lan needs to be first enabled in the computer bios before it can be activated in the network card properties.

More information about that process is available on the Nirsoft website and the manufacturer manuals (Bios, network adapter).

To wake a computer on the local area network select it in the device listing in the program interface and click on the “wake up selected computers” button afterwards. You can alternatively right-click a device and select the same option, or use the F8 shortcut code to do so.

WakeMeOnLan supports command line parameters to wake up computers on the network. The basic command is WakeMeOnLan.exe /wakeup followed by the computer’s IP address, MAC address or computer name.

Windows users who work with computers in a network regularly can download WakeMeOnLan from the Nirsoft website.

Monitored Windows processes get killed at the moment after they are started instead of being blocked outright so that even a start is not possible anymore. A few small scripts can slip through at the moment because of this behavior as it takes some time to recognize a newly launched application and send the kill command to the computer system.

Process Blocker uses a simple text file that is placed in the same installation directory as the main application. This text file contains names of executables that are not allowed to be launched on a computer system. The program itself is added as a Windows Service to the system which has to be restarted after making changes to the text file.

Process Blocker will display a user notification in the Windows System Tray whenever a process has been blocked by the service. A similar application that provides a better user experience is the process manager Process Lasso. The developers of Process Blocker on the other hand are not even halfway through their roadmap. The next step will move the management of processes from the text file to a Group Policy administrative template. Other planned features are killing processes and applications using its crc (in case they get renamed) or full path, recording process errors and information in Windows Event log, allowing users to only run applications from specified folders (e.g. program files and Windows) and changing process killing to process execution prevention.

All available network connections are discovered and added to the list of possible destination nodes. The user may select some or all of the nodes for the process. The source files can come from any directory of a connected computer. Depending on the settings of the application the files get overwritten if they exist or backed up first and then overwritten.

The user does have the option to copy selected files to only one network node by dragging and dropping files onto that node in the program interface. Otherwise the files will be copied to all selected destination nodes.

Remote Batch Copy can query and display network information of each node and also search for nodes that do not appear in the list that is automatically generated at program start.

The software program comes with a second mode called Delete Remote Files which is the exact opposite of the default operation. Selecting this mode will delete the selected files from all remote locations that have been added to the queue.

Configurations can be saved in sessions to be able to perform the configured operations again. Unattended Batch Copies can be executed this way which basically means that the whole operation will run in silent mode in the background requiring no user interaction.