How to use the Wake On Lan feature

Today I’m going to show you the Wake on Lan feature which it helps you to power on (wake up) a computer remotely.

I enabled this feature for a friend, he has a Linksys router which has this feature, we have previously set up port forwarding for one of the machines.

All this work was done in order for him to be able to power on his home computer and transfer files when he’s at work or somewhere else.

1. First make sure this feature is enabled in BIOS

2. Get the ethtool to see if your card supports this (his onboard card does):

yum -y install ethtool

3. Check for Wake On Lan (WOL)

ethtool eth0

The output is quite big, it lists the card’s features, but we’re only interested in these lines:

 Supports Wake-on: pumbg<br />Wake-on: g

This means that the Wake On Lan feature is enabled, so we’re good to go.

4.  If the Wake-On: does not have the letter g present, it means the WOL is not enabled, so you’ll have to do it with:

ethtool -s eth0 wol g

5. Next, we’re interested in finding out the device MAC address, we can get this with simple ifconfig command:

ifconfig eth0 |grep HWaddr
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr <strong>54:E6:FC:81:16:8B</strong>

6. Now power off your computer.

7. The Media Access Control address we “collected” earlier will be used to power on the remote machine.
You may use this address on the router page that allows you to wake up the computer, or install the wakeonlan package on a machine from the same Network segment.
Now, we can wake up the machine with wakeonlantool:

wakeonlan<strong> 54:E6:FC:81:16:8B </strong>

Microsoft Windows users should get the Magic Packet in order to perform the same operation.

Congratulations, now your machine should be powering on if you completed all the steps successfully!

Today I’m going to show you the Wake on Lan feature which it helps you to power on (wake up) a computer remotely.

I enabled this feature for a friend, he has a Linksys router which has this feature, we have previously set up port forwarding for one of the machines.

All this work was done in order for him to be able to power on his home computer and transfer files when he’s at work or somewhere else.

1. First make sure this feature is enabled in BIOS

2. Get the ethtool to see if your card supports this (his onboard card does):

yum -y install ethtool

3. Check for Wake On Lan (WOL)

ethtool eth0

The output is quite big, it lists the card’s features, but we’re only interested in these lines:

 Supports Wake-on: pumbg
Wake-on: g

This means that the Wake On Lan feature is enabled, so we’re good to go.

4.  If the Wake-On: does not have the letter g present, it means the WOL is not enabled, so you’ll have to do it with:

ethtool -s eth0 wol g

5. Next, we’re interested in finding out the device MAC address, we can get this with simple ifconfig command:

ifconfig eth0 |grep HWaddr

 

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr <strong>54:E6:FC:81:16:8B</strong>

6. Now power off your computer.

7. The Media Access Control address we “collected” earlier will be used to power on the remote machine.
You may use this address on the router page that allows you to wake up the computer, or install the wakeonlan package on a machine from the same Network segment.
Now, we can wake up the machine with wakeonlantool:

wakeonlan<strong> 54:E6:FC:81:16:8B </strong>

Microsoft Windows users should get the Magic Packet in order to perform the same operation.

Congratulations, now your machine should be powering on if you completed all the steps successfully!

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