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Wake On LAN (WOL) - how to configure?


Guest tghewett
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Guest tghewett

I am trying to enable Wake On LAN on Mandriva 2006 free edition using a RealTek RTL-8139D ethernet card, but can't get it working. There doesn't appear to be a Mandrake GUI tool which provides control of this feature but the card definitely supports it (see http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/product...spx?modelid=10). I can send a WOL packet to a Mac running OS X and it will wake, but the Linux box won't. The box's Award BIOS has "Resume on LAN" and ACPI enabled, and the box is already configured to boot automatcally when the hardware clock alarm timer reaches the set time, which works fine so the motherboard definitely has the necessary background power to monitor the LAN.

 

I found that the command line tool 'ethtool' provides access to control of Wake On LAN, this is what 'ethtool eth0' shows:

 

Settings for eth0:
       Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
       Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                               100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
       Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
       Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                               100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
       Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
       Speed: 100Mb/s
       Duplex: Full
       Port: MII
       PHYAD: 32
       Transceiver: internal
       Auto-negotiation: on
       Supports Wake-on: pumbg
       Wake-on: d
       Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
       Link detected: yes

 

... where the 'Wake-on' field shows 'd' meaning WOL is disabled. If I now do 'ethtool -s eth0 wol pumbg' to enable all the WOL options the RealTek supports then afterwards re-doing 'ethtool eth0' shows this:

 

        Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
       Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                               100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
       Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
       Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                               100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
       Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
       Speed: 100Mb/s
       Duplex: Full
       Port: MII
       PHYAD: 32
       Transceiver: internal
       Auto-negotiation: on
       Supports Wake-on: pumbg
       Wake-on: pumbg
       Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
       Link detected: yes

 

So the card has accepted the WOL configuration from ethtool. Now if the box is shut down, it ought to be able to wake when receiving a WOL packet... it seems to me at least. However it won't power-on with a WOL packet and when manually rebooted the ethtool output shows the 'Wake-on' field as having returned to 'd', i.e. WOL disabled.

 

What might be happening here? Could something in the shutdown procedure be disabling WOL? Is there a file which declares the WOL state to the OS which might be referenced during shutdown?

 

Does anyone have WOL working, if so could you say how?

Edited by tghewett
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Guest tghewett

Problem solved. The PC has a motherboard with an old version PCI bus. To use a network card for wake-on-lan it provides a 3-pin connector which needs a flying lead to connect to a LAN card which has one of these conectors as well. It only supports wake-on-lan over the bus if the computer is sleeping rather than fully shut down, unless you use the flying lead.

 

Now have a new LAN card and after configuring the card with "ethtool -s eth0 wol g" the card now remembers its configuration over power-off and boots the PC when a WOL magic packet is sent over the net.

Edited by tghewett
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Guest tghewett
Thanks for reporting back - and welcome to the board.  :)

Just to add, the card seems to keep forgetting its WOL setting in spite of the flying lead. Even during the same boot session it forgets it some time after it has been set to 'g' by ethtool (it falls back to 'd', == 'disabled'), maybe there is a Mandriva daemon which is doing this. However the card remembers it fine once the machine has been shut down to soft-off state so I added 'ethtool -s eth0 wol g' to /etc/rc.d/..../halt, just before it syncs the hardware clock to system time.

 

Now works reliably, and very handy too. Now need to work out how to get a WOL packet past my DSL router so I can boot the PC from anywhere. The router does not allow remote access to generate broadcast packets on the LAN...

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