[Discuss] Wake-inLAN

[hag at linnaean.org (Daniel Hagerty)]

Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> writes:

> (I changed the subject on this to specifically reply to Dan.
> My motherboard purportedly supports WOL but there is no indication in
> the BIOS. I was never was able to get it to work. I set up port 9 on my
> router to allow that to pass. It has been a couple of years since I
> played with it. The mother board is a Tyan Thunder n6650 Rev. 1.0

    Well, wol *is* fiddly, since one of the computers involved isn't
playing by the usual rules :)

    You have to send a magic packet such that the sleeping host actually
receives it.  Lack of arp/ndp entries, and switching, can both get in
the way of the "send and receive it" bit, since the host isn't running
to participate in the usual requisites.  Sending to an ethernet
broadcast address can cut a lot of this out, but precludes direct wide
area operation.

    And since it *is* fiddly and somewhat unusual, there's plenty of
latitude for you vendor to have blown it.  Lack of indication in the
bios certainly isn't a good sign.  All I can tell you is that it works
reliably for me, and that the preceding paragraph outlines the issues I
saw along the way for what I'm doing with it.