Linux - NetworkingThis forum is for any issue related to networks or networking.
Routing, network cards, OSI, etc. Anything is fair game.
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I have a Dell Poweredge 2550 that I'm trying to get to respond to wake on lan packets.
Is wake on lan complicated? I didn't used to think so. When I first got the machine in question (second hand), I thought "Hey, wouldnt it be great if it supports wake on lan", I sent the magic packet to it an lo and behold it booted. Great.
Now it doesnt respond to it though
Most things I read recommended running something like
ethtool -s eth0 wol g
Which when I power off the machine (using `shutdown -Ph now` (does that matter?)), it goes through all the usual motions but won't respond to the the magic packet to bring it back up.
I looked on the dell site and followed their instructions for creating a boot disk that can alter the wol settings, essentialy it was an MS-DOS boot disk and a utility for the intel boot agent called "ibautil", if I run this from the boot disk...
ibautil -nic=1 -wole
Then power the machine off it will respond to magic packets and power up. If I power it off while its still in the BIOS then sometimes it will respond to another magic packet and othertimes it wont.
If however, I let it go all the way through its boot cycle (it doesnt have an HD, it netboots using PXE), then it will boot the OS and upon shutting the box down it will not respond anymore to magic packets. This is even if I run the `ethtool -s eth0 wol g` command from within the operating system.
As this machine is one of a small group (all identical hardware and problem), it would be nice to have this feature so I could rely on it to remotely turn machines on and off.
My guess is that something in the boot sequence, possibly even the design of WOL, clears the WOL setting and I need to apply this again at OS shutdown time. Bits i've pieced together suggest it might be a wake on pci issue.
A follow up to this, I still don't know exactly what the issue is but I've read on news groups of people in the same situation, basically me (and them), dont have disks in the machines and they do a netboot with PXE. That means that there is an nfsroot and so when it comes to halting the system things aren't done as they normally would be because the connection needs to be kept open. I can't be more specific than that though and i'm not even sure if its right but it seems to fit.
I subscribed to this thread when you first posted, hoping you, or someone, would post a solution.
The problem seems to be that the interface is "fully shut down" at halt so it no longer listens for the "magic packet". This possibly saves a tiny bit of power.
I tried looking at how shutdown and halt work but I am none the wiser.
I think we'll have to wait until the developers wake up to the problem.
If you search for wake on lan broken you'll see lots of discussion (but I found no solution, perhaps you'll be luckier).
Sadly I am none the wiser. I have done a lot of reading on it now and have found others in the same situation, a few possible solutions but none of them seem to work.
The issue is definitely in how the interface is shut down (otherwise I wouldn't be able to make the wakeonlan bootdisk). My suspicions about it being related to PXE and nfsroot turned out to be false as I made a liveCD of exactly the same thing that would otherwise get netbooted and when I shutdown from there it still failed.
If your interested, the card I'm using is an intel e100, if you search for IBAUTIL.EXE and write it to an MS-DOS 6 or greater boot disk (which you can get from www.bootdisk.com ), you can then boot into that and use the IBAUTIL.EXE to enable WoL. Shut the machine down and WoL works, let it boot into Linux and it'll fail IBAUTIL.EXE is specific to the Intel Boot Agent so if your card isn't intel based it won't work.
The issue is definitely in how the interface is shut down
I agree.
I have not found a work-around for this, and will await the next kernel release, I think the developers are aware of the problem(s).
I cannot see the point of re-booting from an "MS-DOS 6 or greater boot disk", and then shutting down the server. Besides, my interface is different from yours.
The Newsgroups are full of this problem, it'll sort out.
Wait, and be patient - cleverer people will (eventually) sort this out.
You / I'll re-post here if and when a solution is found.
I cannot see the point of re-booting from an "MS-DOS 6 or greater boot disk", and then shutting down the server.
Oh no, it isn't a practical solution, it was useful in my case so I could be sure that the network card, motherboard, power supply etc supported WoL and that I was sending the magic packet correctly. It's pretty useless for day to day unattended booting.
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