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I'm working to get wake on lan (wol) working so that we can do some power management at my workplace. I've enabled WOL on a test laptop running Win 7 x64 and put it to sleep and hibernate both with no luck.

I'm using a 3rd party utility and I've ran wireshark on the test laptop with it booted up and I can see the WOL packets coming in and the machine refuses to wake from sleep or hibernate. I thought maybe it was the computer I was using so I had another Win 7 x64 laptop nearby and I tried it, same scenario.

We're in a cisco environment and I believe I gotten all the pieces in place since I'm seeing the WOL packets come through. I've tested two machines on the same subnet to eliminate the possibility of a misconfiguration on the switch, this also has the same behavior.

The laptop models are a Compaq 6510b and 6730b. Is there something I'm missing? I'm trying this across UDP port 50200 since that's the port the actual management system will use after I get it working.

Caley Woods
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  • Your laptop has a wired connection right? You aren't trying to do WOL of wireless are you? – Zoredache Oct 27 '10 at 20:19
  • Nope, I made sure I turned the WLAN radio off and that i'm sending the WOL magic packet to the MAC address of the wired ethernet port. – Caley Woods Oct 27 '10 at 20:27
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    There's often a BIOS setting for enabling WOL. I'm unfamiliar with the hardware but you should take a look. On one of the machines I own it's labeled "WOL Enable", on another it's conflated with "Wake on Modem Ring". Also, sometimes there may be settings on the network adapter that you can modify from the running OS – see if there's anything relevant in the adapter properties in device manager. – ephemient Oct 27 '10 at 20:54

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There's a lot that can stop WOL from working.

Is it enabled in the BIOS? Mentioned in posts above.

Is the NIC (Network Interface Card) powered after shutdown? An Ethernet NIC should have a green link light and a yellow activity light, the green light should remain on after shutdown for WOL to work, though it may never be on if your network is not capable of the highest speed of the NIC, which is distinctly unhelpful. Your OS would be responsible for turning it off, explicitly enable WOL in Device Manager or ethtool.

Bracken
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You have to enable WOL in BIOS and in the network card settings. You can find details here. Also make sure that WOL packets aren’t blocked by your routers. Also it’s important to understand how packets are sent by WOL utility you use. There are different methods of WOL packets sending: unicast, directed broadcast. You have to choose the best method depending on your network configuration.

Bjorn Svedeborg
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