Wake on lan not working on any PC. Could it be the router?

[alan_surry]

I work from home doing PC & laptop repairs and have several PC's in my workshop and in the house that I can wake up remotely, or at least I used to be able to. In short, I've tried several different wake on lan programs on several different PC's and none of them are working on any of my PC's. My preferred program is Nirsoft's WakemeonLan as it has a nice easy interface that lists all the devices by name, MAC address & IP address. Can anyone suggest a reason why they would all suddenly stop waking up? The only thing I can think of is the router, which is a virgin superhub. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Alan

 

[kanewolf]

Wired connectivity to a LAN device is pass-thru at most on your router. You could test by using a separate switch with an uplink to your router.

 

[bill001g]

The problem is likely the pc running WoL and not the router. You can easily verify that the device gets the packets by running wireshark when the machine is on and see if packet are going over the network. You actually should be able to see all WoL packets from any machine since they are suppose to be sent as broadcast packets to all devices on the lan.

The main problem with wake on lan lately is microsoft. WoL has nothing to do with the OS but microsoft has a bunch of proprietary power save option and sleep options. Some of the BIOS manufactures unfortunately have started to support some of this stuff so windows will make changes to the bios settings which many times makes WoL not work.

So if you see the WoL packets when the machine is running then it has to be some crappy bios problem. If you do not see WoL packets in the captures then it has to be the application sending them. The lan ports on a router act as a simple switch it is almost impossible to filter any traffic even if you wanted to.