[SOLVED] Best router with official support for automatic WOL

nadeejalm

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Sep 28, 2012
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Hi,
I'm looking to buy a new router and main requirement of mine is to wake up my Plex NAS server automatically when ever some one tries to access it. I know I can do this using custom firmware like DD-WRT. But the thing is I'm looking to buy a new router because I bricked my current router trying to upgrade to latest version of DD-WRT firmware and so I want to avoid such risks of using custom firmware.
If anyone know routers with official support for features like this please help me.

Thanks in advance.
 
Solution
I have not kept up on the details of wifi6e, last time I looked there was only 1 chipset and all the routers were using that. There might be more by now.

I would buy wifi6e if you are going to buy something now. It likely still have a number of bugs so you want to stay with well known brands, not sure if the cheap china brands even have wifi6e yet. Wifi6 has pretty much been a obsolete technology from the day it was launched with the 6ghz band being approved much faster than anticipated.

We will have to wait and see if wifi6e lives up to the hype. Normal wiif6 has be massively affected by the limited bandwidth on the 5ghz radio as well as all the strange limitation related to weather radar. Most people saw very little...
Asus firmware has the feature for sure and maybe tplink. Not sure what you mean automatic. The way it works is you log into the router remotely and ask it to send a WoL packet. It mostly works, WoL never worked really well sometime you have to send multiple request. It has become increasing hard to get to work because microsoft has reinvented WoL to include many of its proprietary sleep modes and BIOS manufactures unfortunately have added support. Sometime it is very messy to get to work.

In general what works more consistently is to use the boot on power restore option. You then use one of the many smart plug devices to turn the power on and off.
 

nadeejalm

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Asus firmware has the feature for sure and maybe tplink. Not sure what you mean automatic. The way it works is you log into the router remotely and ask it to send a WoL packet. It mostly works, WoL never worked really well sometime you have to send multiple request. It has become increasing hard to get to work because microsoft has reinvented WoL to include many of its proprietary sleep modes and BIOS manufactures unfortunately have added support. Sometime it is very messy to get to work.

In general what works more consistently is to use the boot on power restore option. You then use one of the many smart plug devices to turn the power on and off.
This NAS is running a plex server. So when ever a plex client tries to access server router should detect that and send a magic packet to the NAS automatically if the NAS is sleeping. This is possible using custom firmware scripts.
Do you know any routers with support for custom scripts?
 
You are likely going to be much better off just using some of the low power save options rather than trying to get WoL to work. Modern equipment can slow the clocks down on the cpu and memory and turn off some things like hard drives but leave the network interface active. This way when it gets any traffic it will bring the power up. It generally does not need
any special software on the end devices since it is normal traffic that will fully activate it. The power use is so low there is very little difference than using WoL and it works much more consistently.

What you are now asking for is far different than a router that supports WoL. Routers have extremely tiny cpu even compared to a cell phone. They are designed for a fairly simple purpose and the vast majority of consumers do not even use most the feature the router already have. Your only option is third party firmware like dd-wrt.
There are other options but all run the risk of messing up a router if you do it wrong. Many routers have methods to recover them so bricking them is not real common any more.

Just be aware if you have a fast internet connection, say above 250mbps, your are going to bottleneck your internet with third party firmware. To get high speed most routers use a method that allow the NAT function to bypass the cpu chip. Many third party images to not fully support this and what you want to do will force the cpu to need to see the traffic.
 

nadeejalm

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Sep 28, 2012
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Guess I will use low power save options then. Can you recommend a good router with wifi 6 support? or should I go for 6 E? I previously used a TP-link Archer C9 and was only getting like 500 Mbps using wifi.
 
I have not kept up on the details of wifi6e, last time I looked there was only 1 chipset and all the routers were using that. There might be more by now.

I would buy wifi6e if you are going to buy something now. It likely still have a number of bugs so you want to stay with well known brands, not sure if the cheap china brands even have wifi6e yet. Wifi6 has pretty much been a obsolete technology from the day it was launched with the 6ghz band being approved much faster than anticipated.

We will have to wait and see if wifi6e lives up to the hype. Normal wiif6 has be massively affected by the limited bandwidth on the 5ghz radio as well as all the strange limitation related to weather radar. Most people saw very little difference between wifi6 and 802.11ac mostly because of the end devices not supporting 160mhz channels
 
Solution