Wake on LAN
Posted: 12 Jan 2008, 13:33
Edit: I had to rewrite this since the last one was a mess.
The goal is to power up any PC on my home network from work.
The PC that is to be powered up remotely has to have Wake On LAN capability, and WOL has to be enabled in BIOS.
All my PCs claim to have this ability, but it doesn’t actually work on all of them. This is yet another reason I will never again buy a motherboard from Asus.
Since I can access my Bubba from work using ssh, all I needed was some software on Bubba that was able to send the magic WOL network packet to the target PC. Etherwake is available in the Debian repositories, and will do just fine.
To install it, become root, and then uncomment the first three lines in /etc/apt/sources.list
Then:
Go back and reinsert the comments in /etc/apt/sources.list, and then do another apt-get update.
To use ehterwake, you need to know the MAC address of the main Ethernet network card of the PC you want to turn on. To find out on Windows, open a command prompt and type:
It is the value called ”Physical address” you are after. It will look something like this:
00-1C-C0-14-2B-48
Etherwake will not accept this format. You will have to replace the hyphens with commas:
00:1C:C0:14:2B:48
To find the MAC address on a Linux machine, execute this as root:
I usually just access the Web interface of my router to find out the MAC address of the computer I want to switch on.
To turn on the PC, execute this on your Bubba as root:
You can then ping the machine you just told to wake up, and when ping gets a response, you know it’s up.
The goal is to power up any PC on my home network from work.
The PC that is to be powered up remotely has to have Wake On LAN capability, and WOL has to be enabled in BIOS.
All my PCs claim to have this ability, but it doesn’t actually work on all of them. This is yet another reason I will never again buy a motherboard from Asus.
Since I can access my Bubba from work using ssh, all I needed was some software on Bubba that was able to send the magic WOL network packet to the target PC. Etherwake is available in the Debian repositories, and will do just fine.
To install it, become root, and then uncomment the first three lines in /etc/apt/sources.list
Then:
Code: Select all
apt-get update
apt-get install etherwake
To use ehterwake, you need to know the MAC address of the main Ethernet network card of the PC you want to turn on. To find out on Windows, open a command prompt and type:
Code: Select all
ipconfig /all
00-1C-C0-14-2B-48
Etherwake will not accept this format. You will have to replace the hyphens with commas:
00:1C:C0:14:2B:48
To find the MAC address on a Linux machine, execute this as root:
Code: Select all
ifconfig -a
To turn on the PC, execute this on your Bubba as root:
Code: Select all
etherwake 00;1C;C0;14;2B;48