Wake On LAN
Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2009 4:18 pm
Just setup Wake On LAN on my wife's PC so I can power it up to run a backup without having to run around the house. Thought the following might be interesting to others.
1) Setup the hardware - older PCI network cards may require a little cable from the card to the motherboard, onboard adaptors don't.
2) Setup the BIOS - enable WOL in the BIOS, usually under the Power->APM screen, may be a separate entry or covered by something like "Allow PCI/PCIe devices to wake the PC"
3) Check the driver supports WOL, as root run and look for The "g" means it supports "MagicPacket" WOL (extra letters mean other methods as well, don't worry about those), the "d" means it is disabled at the moment. To set this to enabled on every boot put in /etc/rc.local and also run that command now.
4) Stop the kernel from powering off the network card at shutdown. Most distributions call "halt" with the "-i" parameter at the end of the shutdown scripts. That "-i" powers off the network card. Under Ubuntu we can stop this by editing /etc/default/halt as root
5) Find the MAC address of the system by running and looking for Make a note of it somewhere
6) Power down the machine and check the lights on the network interface are still on.
7) On the machine that will boot up the other one, install "wakeonlan" e.g.
You can now do and it should power up. If you have an nVidia motherboard that uses the "forcedeth" driver, you may need to reverse the MAC address to The kernel guys keep getting it wrong in the driver, it was broken in 2006 and it was also broken again last year unfortunately right when Ubuntu 8.10 was released.
1) Setup the hardware - older PCI network cards may require a little cable from the card to the motherboard, onboard adaptors don't.
2) Setup the BIOS - enable WOL in the BIOS, usually under the Power->APM screen, may be a separate entry or covered by something like "Allow PCI/PCIe devices to wake the PC"
3) Check the driver supports WOL, as root run
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ethtool eth0Code: Select all
Supports Wake-on: g
Wake-on: d
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ethtool -s eth0 wol g4) Stop the kernel from powering off the network card at shutdown. Most distributions call "halt" with the "-i" parameter at the end of the shutdown scripts. That "-i" powers off the network card. Under Ubuntu we can stop this by editing /etc/default/halt as root
Code: Select all
# Default behaviour of shutdown -h / halt. Set to "halt" or "poweroff".
HALT=poweroff
# Enable WOL
NETDOWN=no
5) Find the MAC address of the system by running
Code: Select all
ifconfig eth0Code: Select all
HWaddr 00:17:31:83:a0:f56) Power down the machine and check the lights on the network interface are still on.
7) On the machine that will boot up the other one, install "wakeonlan" e.g.
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sudo apt-get install wakeonlanYou can now do
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wakeonlan 00:17:31:83:a0:f5Code: Select all
wakeonlan f5:a0:83:31:17:00