Wake on WLAN

[pusur44017]

Hello, I have a desktop connected with a USB wireless network card. There seems to be some dispute if WoWLAN is possible or not, but I decided to try. I found this: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee851581%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
Tried that, option to allow my WLAN card to power up computer is still greyed out.

My WLAN card is zyxel N450. The article above mentiones some driver. Is that anything that would be worth trying? I have been in my BIOS to enable WOL, the only thing I can find is power on with onboard LAN (or simmilar) and I hope this is the same. I also have a zxyel router, it's no use giving you a specific model number because it is very specific to my (Norwegian) ISP. It has some portforwarding setting that tells it to allow WOL to the target IP. Is this needed?

To clarify: I want to be able to wake on WLAN. If it's not possible, any suggestions to how I can have simmilar functionality would be very appreciated.

 

[bill001g]

You have a huge number of issues.

First I don't even understand why a registry setting would make any difference. A machine when it is use wake on lan it is running only on the bios there is no OS running. How does the bios know before you load the OS from the drive if it is windows or Ubuntu or something else.

Maybe there is some form of sleep mode that windows supports that is not really WoL and they are just calling it that. In that case who knows what requirements microsoft has for their own propriety protocol.

So pretty much your bios must support the adapters you are using. Still wireless is not as simple as a lan. Lan it takes almost no power to sit and listen for some magic packet. With wireless the radio must also transmit on a regular basis to the router because of the encryption keys need to be maintained. So this greatly increases the complexity that is required to support this.

So lets assume you manage to get this figured out. The protocol you want to use is called wake on LAN for a reason. It is not wake on WAN. The data sent to wake a machine is a very special packet. To 100% conform to the rules this really can only be sent from a machine on the lan segment not from some remote device passing though your router. There are hacks to make routers do this by mapping ARP entries to broadcast addresses but you will not find this support in any standard router you will have to use third party firmware.

If you can not live with the simple powersave option in the OS and just have to have the machine turned off I would look at the power strips you can buy that allow you to remotely turn the outlets on and off. We use commercial variety of these all the time to remotely reboot a machine that gets itself huge of crashed and will not respond.

 

[pusur44017]

There is a WOL ability in my router by default. As stated I realise that his might not be possible, and I also know there is a powersave option on my computer, but I asked about Wake on WAN/WLAN for a reason. But what you say about BIOS helps, I might be able to do some research there.

EDIT: Went around the internet, disbled deep power off and enabled PCIE stuff to power stuff on. portforwarded port 9 and allowed for WOL. Still nothing.

 

[bill001g]

A wake on lan packet is a special packet sent to the broadcast mac address. It must contain the mac address of the machine to wake in a special pattern. It does not contain a IP header but some devices will accept it as garbage but there is no standard to this.

Any concept of port forwarding is invalid. There are no IP addresses or ports or anything in a wake on lan packet.

All the so called solution to this are some form of hack. A machine does not have a IP address when there is no OS running it only have a MAC. Attempts to port forward to the machines IP do not work because the ARP entry in the router will time out. Besides a machine it not technically suppose to wake up to packets sent to its mac address it is suppose to wake up to packets send to the broadcast mac address.

This is one of those if the machine follow the standard for WoL to the letter you pretty much can't do it. If it deviates from the standard then there is no way to know what non standard things work and which do not. This is the same for a router. The support for this is called directed broadcast and is a feature I have only seen on commercial routers. It is disabled by default because you can cause broadcast storms with specially crafted packets.

You can keep working on it but even you get it to work it may not work consistently because of things like arp timeouts.

You will be very lucky to get it to work on a wired lan port I suspect you will never get it work on a wireless port because of the encryption.

 

[pusur44017]

Oh well. Thanks for the info anyways. Any other ways to remote boot besides the remote outlet?

 

[bill001g]

Buy a low power device like raspberry pi and use it to WoL the main machine. You would use some form of web page on the raspberry that you would access remotely and then tell it to run a program to broadcast out the WoL packet.

This is how it is done securely in enterprise, they leave 1 server up to wake up all the rest. Then again WoL lan been replaced with ILO which is basically a small single chip computer used to control a server.

 

[SwissBuster]

Oh well. Thanks for the info anyways. Any other ways to remote boot besides the remote outlet?

What do you wish to achieve with the WoWAN functionality?

I ask because I've been going down the WoLAN route with limited (read: no) success. In my case, I wanted to save cost on running my HTPC 24/7 by putting it into sleep state when not in use. I'm running MediaPortal for this HTPC which has an app (PowerScheduler) with pretty reliable shutdown and scheduled startup (after a weekend on tinkering to get it to work...).

Ideally, I would want remote access 24/7. I'm not there yet. However, I have scheduled certain maintainance tasks during the working week. At those times, the HTPC is on, so I can remotely access via TeamViewer if I need to. It's a workaround but it could help in a pinch.