Hello and thanks in advance for any help.

We are having a strange problem here at work. All of our PC's are booting up by themselves about 15-20 mins after they are shutdown. I pulled the network cable from one and it did not start on its own. So it seems to be getting a signal from somewhere on the network to bootup. We have about 20 PC's that are doing this.

I went into BIOS and disabled ALL "wake-on" settings and went into device manager to disable any of these settings as well but it is STILL booting up by itself???

Is there anyway to tell what is sending this signal to bootup? We have not changed anything that I know of since this has started (about a week now).

Please help!!

John

Wireshark (or other port scanner) on common or mirrored port will show what is going on.

See info on magic packet.

Disable all power functions in bios. Include wake on keyboard and such. Disable power features in bios too.

Disable hibernation, see scheduled tasks, see event viewer.

I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

If you have surge protection (as you should), turn off the power source, and the machines won't boot until the power is restored.

Life's more painless for the brainless.

From and earth point of view that may be better. Put all the wall warts and computer,monitor on a single switch. When the person turns off the computer ask them to throw the switch. It should pay for itself in no time in electricity savings and ac load.

I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

Thanks for the tips everyone. We do have surge protectors and they are turning them off there now. I am just curious as to what would cause this to start happening all of a sudden. I wanted to make sure that it it not a virus of some sort. We do currently have Trend Micro SMB on ALL workstations and it has not detected anything.

The only thing that I left "enabled" in the BIOS was HDD and FDD. This was listed in with the "wake on" settings. I will disable these as well and see if that cures it??

Just to let everyone know:

I downloaded the wireshark program and noticed that a lot of traffic was coming from my IT tech's PC. He had spiceworks on it that was constantly scanning the network for new devices. We shut that program off last night and left the surge protectors on (with the PC's off) and came in this morning with NO PC's that were back up and running.

So it seems that it was this spiceworks progam that was "waking" all of our workstations. It must have had an update last week sometime because that is when all of this started.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

John

I'm not familiar with spiceworks but it's likely it was indeed sending the WOL (Wake On LAN - aka, 'magic packet') to the PC's and waking them up.

If the IT guy want's to run that program, you'll have to go into the PC's BIOS and disable WOL.

spiceworks is very boring.
it asked me use an email address as a user account. And it told me it will try to use this user account (email address) remotely log in another computer?