Wake On Lan Mini Tutorial

BIOS

Activating Wake On Lan is a two step process. First you must enable WOL in your motherboard's BIOS, which is accessed by pressing either Del or F2 during boot.

The options I've found to be required are most often found in the Power section. On my Asus motherboard, the following features needed to be enabled:

• ACPI 2.0
• Power Management/APM (Advanced Power Management)
• Resume on LAN (or similar)

The second step is ensuring that your operating system doesn't turn off your network card when the computer is shutdown.

Windows

NB: these instructions will vary from computer to computer, use your intuition, Google is your friend.

Head for your computer's Device Manager. Start by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Properties..

In the System Properties dialog, select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.

Now in Device Manager, open the section of the tree called Network adapters. Right-click your network card from the items which appear, and select Properties.

This is dialog is now specific to your network hardware. The image below may not be the same as what you see! Select the Advanced tab, and choose Wake Up Capabilities from the list. Switch the right-hand drop down to Magic Packet.

Debian

Edit /etc/init.d/halt setting this line at the top of the file, to prevent network interface being disabled at poweroff.

  NETDOWN=no

Use this command to check the status of eth0

  $ ethtool eth0

If the output of this command displays the following, your network card is set up already.

  Wake-on: g

In some cases, this hasn't been set, so you can fix with the following. Run ethtool setting the wol status of eth0 to 'g':

  $ ethtool -s eth0 wol g

This setting is lost at reboot, so add the following to /etc/rc.local:

  # set network card to listen for Magic Packets
  ethtool -s eth0 wol g

This is the list of options for waking with WOL:

  p Wake on phy activity
  u Wake on unicast messages
  m Wake on multicast messages
  b Wake on broadcast messages
  a Wake on ARP
  g Wake on MagicPacket(tm)
  s Enable SecureOn(tm) password for MagicPacket(tm)
  d Disable (wake on nothing). This option clears all previous options.

Debian system will need a reboot after this has been configured.

Disclamier

All the information contained in this tutorial is provided for the convenience of its readers. All information is accurate as well as can be reasonably verified. There are no guarantees or warranties stated or implied by the distribution of this information. Use of the information in this document is at the reader's own risk, and no liability shall be given to the author. Any damage or loss is the sole responsibility of the reader.