Wake On LAN

[indyitguy]

Does WOL require a configuration on switches? I've enabled it on the host PC within the bios as well as the NIC. I have PDQ Inventory setup and I'm using Aquila's Wake On LAN utility to test. I get a host not responding error when I try to wake the system. PDQ Inventory is running on it's own server and I have Aquila's utility running on my system. Everything is on the same subnet... I've added inbound and outbound rules to the firewalls on the host system as well as my system to allow UDP on port 9. Does anyone have an idea on what I'm missing?

 

[bill001g]

Pretty much you should only have to set the bios options on the pc you want to wake up. Since the machine is in effect shutdown there is no OS running so it does not matter what settings you have made in software firewalls. If there is a bios firewall preventing say broadcasts then that could be a issue but mostly it is a simple bios option you turn on. You likely can't even set things in your switch.....very technically if you had a manged switch you could block this but it is unlikely you have a manged switch in the first place.

These tend to be very tricky to find. Either the machine sending it is not really sending the data, the data is not in the proper format, the WoL machine is not really receiving it, or it receives it and ignores it for some reason.

I would try to load wireshark on your machine and capture traffic. Even though your machine is awake and running if you were to send a wakeup packet from the other machine you should still see it. You should actually be able to see the packet in the capture. You can then look at and see if it is in the correct format. Wireshark should automatically identify it as a WoL packet if it is proper.

If you get the packet then you know it has to be the bios not accepting it for some reason.

The most common reason this does not work is that pc is enforcing the rules on WoL packets to the letter. Many WoL software send the packet to the actual PC mac address. The packet is suppose to be sent to the broadcast mac address. The data portion of the packet must contain the mac in a very special pattern. Many people think you can send to the mac of the device and it can contain IP headers....(UDP port 9 junk). Some machines will accept this but neither of these is in the standard so you can get incompatibilities.

 

[indyitguy]

I was able to test that the packet was reaching the host system using Aquila's WOL utility so I started to look at the host more. It's a Dell Optiplex 7010sff with the Intel 82579LM NIC. When I went back into NIC properties I noticed two checkboxes on the Power Management tab; "Respond to ARP requests without waking system" and "Respond to NS requests without waking system". I unchecked both and now WOL works from both PDQ Inventory as well as the Aquila utility. Always something small... lol Thanks for the post bill001g