[SOLVED] Wake On Lan over Internet (WAN) stops working despite ARP binding

[lermand7]

Hi!

I've been trying to configure Wol over the Internet for a good month now and occasionally it works.

I've done every single step required and have MANAGED to turn on my computer from the other end of the country. But with enough time passing it seems to stop working (like overnight). I suspected this was caused by the arp entry, but this too i have set up with a reserved IP address. I also have a dynamic dns set up (No-IP).

At this point what could be resetting or changing for this to happen?

 

[bill001g]

There is little power saving compared to the sleep modes most machines have so it may not be worth the hassle.

Many of the instruction you find to do this are not correct. Many do not even talk about the ARP problem so you have to know the person who wrote it does not actually know how things work.

A wake on lan packet is a packet that is sent to the broadcast mac address containing the mac address of the machine to be woken.

You will notice there is nothing about ports or ip or anything so technically packets with IP headers are not valid. Most pc bios accept them. The non standard implementations of WoL is what makes this confusing.

Some instruction say you should put the static ARP in for the machine you are actually waking but that too is not part of the standard. Some machines will accept this and others will not. You need to put in a static ARP for a dummy address mapped to the broadcast mac address.

In addition to all this mess the bios manufacture have started to implement some of microsofts proprietary sleep/wake options. So you have to be very careful when you shut the machine down that windows does not change the settings.

The best way I have seen to get this to work is to have a special feature on the router since that must be on all the time. Asus has this. You pretty much log into the router remotely and ask it to send the WoL packet and since it is actually on the lan it can send a real WoL packet without the hacks. Many people also use raspberry pi to do this.

I guess it all depends why you want to do this. The power saving is extremely small so you would really want to do it for other reasons

 

[lermand7]

Are you suggesting that this shouldn't be a problem in sleep mode?

 

[bill001g]

Not sure what you are asking. You do not even need WoL if you just use the sleep modes. Although this term gets confusing since microsoft redefined some of the sleep modes to be WoL.

Pretty much just use the modes that let the machine drop everything to low power. The machine is actually fully functional it just running at massively reduced clock rates with power hungry stuff like video and disk turned off.

 

[lermand7]

What kind of sleep mode doesn't require wol? If i wanna remote access my PC (e.g Remote Desktop), it needs to be woken up either way (at least using windows sleep). In case I wasn't clear (tho i did not mention it), i wanna use my home PC through my laptop from anywhere i may be. But of course I dont wanna have to have my PC running all the time.