Saturday, November 18, 2006

Wake On LAN (WOL)

Update:
3Com card has gone now, for contemporary cards use ethtool
1. Verify that for your card g is present in the Wake-on support:
# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
....
Supports Wake-on: pumbg
....

If yes, add this line to /etc/rc.local
/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g

Now the original post:

Just another example how it is time-consuming to do anything with Linux. Still, love the power of text console and beeing Microsoft-free.
My 3C905C card boots Linux from network nicely, and also can wake the PC on magic packet. Spent several nights over couple of weeks to make it work.

*WOL cable not needed - if PCI bus is 2.2 and card is 2.2 and installed in proper PCI slot (depends on the motherboard), it should wake the machine with no 3-wire WOL cable

*ether-wake sends the magic packet:
# ./ether-wake -i eth2 00:01:02:3B:C1:FC

* When troubleshooting, first try with Windows, not Linux. E.g. Fedora disables WOL by default. Without knowing that, one may spend his life switching cards and motherboards...

* Google brought mostly people asking for help, but little help on the subject. There is ethtool option to control WOL in the card, but it does not work with the 3c59x driver. Options for the kernel module suggested by the people did not work for me either.

So, I looked into the 3c59x.c and here's the solution!

[root@fedora ~]# cat /etc/modprobe.conf
alias eth0 3c59x
options 3c59x global_enable_wol=1

Well, quite a progress. Now I can turn on my HTPC hdden in the back room, from my coach. I can control the receiver via UIRT. I play MP3s with slimserver and softsqueeze. I play DTS with aplay. I can power the PC down with poweroff command. Basically, I have got all audio functionality I'm looking for. My remote control is my notebook, and that is perfectly fine for now. The next step is to make the video work.

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