Keeping Switched On
Do you know what PAT and Wake On LAN software is?
Adam our apprentice does. Adam has spent time learning and understanding just how crucial to a business’s smooth-running reliability and safety can be.
It’s month 2 at Smarter Technologies for Adam and he’s been learning new skills almost every day. Learning about Portable Appliance Testing (PAT) is one of the basic tasks that an IT specialist should be able to do. This is an essential housekeeping task which ensures all portable electrical items (basically, anything which can be moved and needs to be connected to the mains electricity supply) are tested at regular intervals to check that they can be safely used. Business owners are required to regularly maintain and check their portable, mains-connected electrical items, in line with HSE recommendations and the IET Code of Practice for in-service inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment, 4th Edition.
Adam used a Seaward Primetest 250 PAT machine. One of the benefits of this machine, is that it saves all the data which can be transferred and archived for the business. After testing, the client receives a form detailing the data and a certificate with renewal information. All items which are tested have a ‘passed’ sticker with the renewal date included too.
“I found this really interesting as I love to learn new skills.” Adam said, “It was sometimes a challenge to find all the items in a busy office when people were working. A lot of the cables got tangled up and some clients had really old items.”
Learning about LAN Remote Access (Wake On LAN – WoL)
We haven’t just had Adam carrying out PAT testing this month, Adam was given the job of researching a type of software which gives its user remote access to the PCs connected to the LAN. LAN is short for Local Area Network, and this means any number of PCs connected together through the same network either by cables or Wi-Fi.
“This is a software program that allows us to switch on our client’s PCs remotely using IP and MAC addresses.” Adam continued “It will make things easier on maintenance visits as we can switch the PCs on remotely and start the scanning process before we arrive, saving us a lot of time and, more importantly, less disruption to our client’s working day.”
To use this software, installation would be required on the client’s own server and network infrastructure, settings adjusted to allow access and then the MAC addresses collected from each PC which needed to be accessed. To make sure that this worked, we had to check that the right network card and base system settings were correct to support the Wake On LAN software.
Adam was very interested in this task. “It was something completely new to me, I had never even heard of it before. Also with this task I got to follow this all the way through from the research to implementing it to use with our regular clients.”
If you would like Adam and our team to see if this solution is right for your network system, please get in touch with our helpful and knowledgeable staff via our contact us page. Remote access, if it is installed correctly and safely, can definitely aid your business.
