Wake On Lan

[felixrosbergen]

Since i travel quite a bit and sometimes i want/need something from a PC at home I would like to be able to wake these machines up somehow.

I did quite a bit of reading and Wake On Lan seems to be problematic at best.

Has anybody got this working well?

Do you actually need this little cable form NIC to Mobo?

How do i check if a PC supports it?

Would i work better if the 'magic packet' is issued from withni the network? Generally my home server will be on, but my desktops may not be. I could remote into the server and use some sort of tool to send the magic packet from there..

From my reading there seem to be problems 'keeping the PC off' as well as 'waking it up' when needed.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

I also use CQC...can it send magic packets?

 

[DavidL]

There are many command line WOL applications. It's gotta be easy to get CQC to use one via a command line interface etc, if WOL isn't natively supported.

 

[beelzerob]

WOL is natively supported in CQC...it's a system command, sendable in an action.

I tried it once but couldn't get it to work, but I probably didn't have it setup on the PC right (I've never gotten it to work in any manner). I think it has to be turned on in bios, and I did that...but that apparently wasn't enough.

 

[TXFlatLander]

Has anybody got this working well?
I use it at work sometimes to power on a workstation that has been powered off. It works pretty good.

Do you actually need this little cable form NIC to Mobo?
I assume you mean for external ethernet cards. If your motherboard has embedded NIC, no cable is needed if it supports WOL

How do i check if a PC supports it?
Check in your BIOS to see if you have a WOL enable/disable option is the quickest way (I am assuming you have embedded NIC). Also, you can always check your motherboard manufacturer's website for information on your particular motherboard. If it is external, check the NIC manufacturer's page.

Would i work better if the 'magic packet' is issued from withni the network? Generally my home server will be on, but my desktops may not be. I could remote into the server and use some sort of tool to send the magic packet from there..

You would have to issue it from within the network, unless you opened up port forwarding at your router and if using Windows firewall on the PC, add exception for whatever port you use. Your router may be able to run a third party firmware, such as DD-WRT. If so, you can setup a VPN, VPN into your router and send the WOL request over VPN and limit your unfettered port exposure.

From my reading there seem to be problems 'keeping the PC off' as well as 'waking it up' when needed.
Haven't used it enough to speak to this. It works when I have needed for the most part. I would make sure your request is not getting filtered at the firewall(s).

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Solarwinds offers a free WOL tool. Here is another one. I have no experience with these as we use an enterprise management suite to fire off the WOL requests.

I also use CQC...can it send magic packets?
Don't know I am new to CQC. Maybe via a CLI WOL tool like this

 

[wuench]

I use CQC to send WOL, it works fine. I think it is one of the system action commands. The key is you have to make sure the machine you want to wakeup is setup for it properly. Also, the magic packet is a MAC (layer-2) broadcast, which means it HAS to be sent from the local subnet within your network. It will not cross a router. So you need one of your other machines to send it.

From what I have seen, some machines only respond from a sleep or hibernate state, some respond when powered down. I think the key is your NIC has to have power. If it is built-in to the motherboard this is a bios setting, if not, you need to make sure your PCI bus is getting power when the machine is off via a bios setting, or have a separate cable attached to power the card. If you don't have a link light on your NIC and router when the machine is powered down, it isn't going to work.

When your machine is powered off, it doesn't have an IP address, that is provided by the OS which isn't active. The only thing the NIC knows is it's MAC address, that is why WOL uses MAC and not IP addresses.

 

[damage]

my media server only wakes from shutdown or standby, not hibernation. 1 out of 20 times it wouldn't wake up. i ended up wiring a relay from my TimeCommander+ across the power switch terminals. you could also just get any old DC powered relay, power it with a wall wart connected to a UPB/etc module and connect the switch side to the power button terminals. just add some logic to toggle the UPB on for a second then off.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Both my old motherboard in my current dual-core system and my older single core system would only WOL from the onboard NIC when it was first booted fully and shut down from Windows normally. If it lost power for any reason, WOL failed to work as it had lost whatever setting enabled it. This is in addition to having to have the WOL enabled in BIOS, which the original BIOS didn't even have, but an update included. They are both onboard Realtek NICs. I have the WOL cable on my Linux box but honestly it's on 24/7 anyways.

My new motherboard (also onboard Realtek) sadly lacks this out of the box, I haven't gotten around to looking for an updated BIOS yet. I use a command line tool from my always-on Linux server via SSH to remote boot my windows boxen if they're not turned on and I want to RDP into them, one of them is in fact a headless server. There are of course GUI and command line tools available on Windows and presumably Mac as well.

In the BIOS it may be a simple on/off toggle to enable it, or it might hinge on other things affecting the ability of devices to wake the system up.

 

[znelbok]

WOL will need to be turned on in the BIOS.

If the NIC is not integrated then the little cable from the MB to the NIC is requried. This powers the NIC while the PC is off so that it maintains a link with the switch and can listen for the "magic packet"

Magic packets use the MAC address, not the IP address. MAC address' never change, IP's do.

CQC will send the magic packet - it is a built in command (as mentioned above). I use it all the time. I have CQC wake up my workstation every morning for me to read e-mails. It also wakes it up for me in the afternoon just before I am due home.

There are a few command line based apps out there and there are a couple of GUI based ones.

I was using a command based one as part of the office backup I manage. People were powering down at night which makes it hard to then do a backup so I wrote a batch file that just send out magic packets to all machines involved and they would all boot up if hey were off. Worked a treat.

Mick