I'm attempting to build a system to Auto-WOL devices when plugged into HP ProCurve switches (2510G and 2530G models). This is on a completely flat network, no VLANs or subnet routing.
If you'd like to know my reason why, we have thousands of devices coming in to be network imaged in our facility. Each device by default has WOL-to-PXE on, and an automated WOL system can save minutes of time per machine (which adds up to quite a lot if we could optimize the process).
At the moment, I can successfully scrape the MAC Address list of the switch and send WOL packets to the addresses (this is in a Windows environment, by the way).
Where I'm currently stuck is that the HP ProCurve switch does not learn the MAC Address upon a device (with power, but off) plugged in. This breaks my flow, and I believe some vendors do learn the MAC of an offline device plugged in (I can't confirm this- HP shop here).
Now on a test device, I can send a directed WOL and it wakes up, switch learns the MAC Address, all is well. I believe this involves an ARP request.
Am I understanding the technology correctly, that what I'm looking to do is send a Gratuitous ARP (via say a Cygwin port of ARPing) to the broadcast address FFFFFF-FFFFFF? I read some data here - http://wiki.wireshark.org/Gratuitous_ARP - but I get the impression that this is the wrong solution (pushing the MAC of the machine out to all others versus causing the others to report back). I've tried to do a ping against the IP Broadcast address as well to no avail.
I guess what I'm asking for is, does a solution exist where a single host can cause an unknown NIC MAC Address to respond so as to populate the switch MAC Table? Or another solution that could get this data?
EDIT: I've setup a CentOS box to run arp-scan but it didn't trigger anything (http://linux.die.net/man/1/arp-scan) and neither did arping. Brute forcing the OUI would be 16 million per OUI (if we locked it down to just HP, for example, they have multiple entries). I bring it up as a note in case a Linux box would be needed, I have one available.