Okay, I'm currently trying to setup WOL. The machine I'm trying to wake up is running gentoo, and kernel version 2.6.12.3. For some reason the machine refuses to be woken up. I enabled WOL in my BIOS settings, but that seemed to do nothing. "Ethtool eth0" gives this output:

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: 24
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Current message level: 0x00000001 (1)
Link detected: yes

When I try to enable wol via "ethtool -s eth0 wol g" I get this output:
Cannot get current wake-on-lan settings: Operation not supported
not setting wol

I've also tried enabling WOL by passing the argument at boot time via:
"append = "enable enable_wol=1" added to /etc/lilo.conf However this achieved nothing.

The ethernet card on the machine I wish to WOL is a 3Com 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone] which is built in to my motherboard. lspci -v gives this output about the card:

0000:00:11.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone] (rev 24)
Subsystem: Dell 3C905B Fast Etherlink XL 10/100
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
I/O ports at dc00 [size=fb000000]
Memory at ff000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128]
Expansion ROM at 00020000 [disabled]
Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1

I'm fairly certain I'm shutting down properly, and the machine I wish to wake up is not down. After a "shutdown -h -t 0 now" on the machine I wish to WOL I still mantain a sold green light where the ethernet port is, and also there is a solid green light visable on the motherboard. arp -a run from the machine I send the magic packets from gives this ouput:

? (192.168.0.2) at 00:B0:D0:25:72:87 [ether] on ra0

ra0 being the wireless interface on my laptop (the machine I send the magic packets from).

I'm stumped, and tired. Any help is appreciated.

Today while at work I thought that maybe my router was somehow dropping the WOL packets, or otherwise screwing things up. However, I fired up tethereal, and found out that the packets are being send to Dest. port 9. I appended my router to allow this, and sent out some magic packets. It had a result, but not the desired one. tethereal showed that tha packets sent through the router and were sent to the correct machine. Though the machine failed to start up. Though it did produce a change in the output from arp :

Address HWtype HWaddress Flags Mask Iface
192.168.0.2 ether (incomplete) C ra0

Again any help or insight is appreciated.

Okay, now this gets really strange. I got WOL to work by disabling ACPI in my bios settings. However, now I can wake up remotely, but I can't shutdown remotely. Does anyone have any idea how to solve this problem? I tried leaving ACPI diabled in my bios settings, and adding acpi=force to /etc/lilo.conf, but this still does not let me power down remotely.

Okay. I solved my own damn problem. I just ditched acpi (still no idea why it conflicted with wol). I went with apm. Recompiled with apm support enabled passed apm=on and apm=power-off to the kernel, and bam. Figured I'd share for the hell of it incase anyone else has/had the same issue.

I just wanted to say thank you for posting your solution and detailed descriptions of the problem, even though none of us here were able to help you.

Just glad to help out where I can.