[Discuss] Unable to disable Wake On Lan

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 3:15 PM,  <edwardp at linuxmail.org> wrote:
> Upon upgrading Debian Linux (64-bit) Squeeze (6) to Wheezy (7), the on-board
> NIC (Realtek) will not shut down when the system is brought down.  I
> discovered this when the port light on the router remained on.  However, in
> Windows 7, the NIC shuts down properly.
>
> In Squeeze, for the NIC to shut down properly, I added 'post-up ethtool -s
> eth0 wol d' to /etc/network/interfaces under the primary network interface
> information:
>
> #The primary network interface
> auto eth 0
> iface lo inet loopback
> post-up ethtool -s eth0 wol d
>
> This information was retained after the upgrade, however Wheezy seems to be
> ignoring this now.  The only way at present to get the NIC to shut down
> after a Linux session, is to open a terminal window and manually entering
> the ethtool command above.  Then it sticks.  Upon a reboot, ethtool eth0
> shows Wake on Lan back to the 'g' setting.
>
> I have also added post-down with the same ethtool command as above in
> /etc/network/interfaces and also added the ethtool command to /etc/rc.local
> before the 'exit 0' line.  Neither of these two worked.
>
> Are there any other things worth trying?

Are you 100% certain that those commands are actually getting
executed?   Without error?
I would probably try replacing the command(s) with a shell script that
logged any errors while running
the same command.   Think of  this as the moral equivalent of
"printf() debugging" for system configuration
files.  It's not elegant, but it can be useful.

Good Luck,
Bill Bogstad