Hi all,

I'm trying to wol a fedora 15 server through the internet. Now I've tried port forwarding and broadcasting to 192.168.0.255 and 192.168.0.0, but that doesn't work, and my router doesn't support wol, so I've given up on that. Now I'm wondering if there's any way of connecting to a windows computer that's on, on the local network, and have that wol my server (without logging out the person on the windows computer). I know this is technically a windows question, but I figure you linux gurus would know more than the windoze noobs out there. Thanks!

cygwin can be the answer. run an sshd daemon on the windows box.
That means you will need administrator access to run it and to run a software capable of generating the WOL packet.
Maybe this can be of help
http://www.ezlan.net/WOL.html

WOL is a layer 2 function (ethernet), not layer 3 (internet). You can't wake a NIC using an IP address. NICs don't have a TCP/IP stack and the CPU is asleep. The magic packet is an ethernet packet containing the MAC address of the NIC you're trying to wake. Ethernet packets don't get through routers.

Sam.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/WOL

http://www.ezlan.net/WOL.html

http://wol.dtools.net/

the list goes on.

My router won't forward the WOL packets, but thanks for the cygwin suggestion, it's the thing I need!

If you go that way, you will still need a windows binary to generate the WOL packet.
You can ssh from internet and run the windows executable from cygwin. I don't see any cygwin binary supporting WOL ( http://www.cygwin.com/packages/ )

That's alright, I compiled it from source!

WEll, i think there is a cygwin sdk or dev environment somewhere. However, I wouldn't expect a low level tool, designed to create arbitrary packets in linux, would work on windows. But, YMMV.
Regards
Sebastian

Unless your router is explicitly discarding incoming packets snooping in their payload for WOL signatures, which I doubt, here is your problem. When your computer is awake, your router knows that 192.168.0.x is taken by computer with MAC address say 10:9a:dd:71:55:60 . This mapping is in the ARP table of the router. When your computer goes to sleep, this ARP entry eventually is marked stale and discarded or replaced. At that moment, your router does not know anymore where to forward traffic for that address.

You can produce WOL packets from remote. These are wrapped into IP packets to be delivered to your router. When the packet gets to your router, however, the router has no clue where to forward it to, because there is no ARP entry for that host. You can verify this by trying to wake your computer from remote shortly after stand-by (should work) and long after (will not).

You have 2 ways around it:

• configure your router to statically route packets to the IP of your sleepy computer to its own physical port
• access to your router's text console and issue the WOL command from it. OpenWRT et al allow you to do this