Old isa & pci cards use those headers. I still have some very old 3com cards at home somewhere... Newer cards do everything via pci/pciexpress bus. My intel CT gigabit card pciexpress 1x works flawlessly with wol.
Like the OP, I'm messing with WOL on my new freenas server. This is my second iteration of freenas server. The other one runs 24/7, but this one is the back up for the backup, so I want to boot it when it is to do its stuff, then put it to sleep.
Wake On LAN is best modeled as a variant of a computer game. There is a final "win" that is available only after you have executed many tasks and situations correctly on multiple layers. The layers include hardware as well as software setup.
I fail to see the logic in using the cheapest available hardware to hold your data. Having lost a few machines and hard drivers in the last couple of decades, it's not a good tradeoff. My opinion is that the hardware should be reasonably commensurate with the worth of the data - a kind of "insurance payment" that's cheaper than recreating the data from scratch or living with the loss. That's just me.
In any case, what I've learned in trying to get this iteration up and running is that
1. Your hardware has to support it. Both the motherboard and network interface have to have it as a built in function, and the power supply has to have a +5V standby power suitable to support it. In the case of the motherboard in question, it having a jack on the MB to plug in a NIC header means it probably does have the capability, but only from a suitably matching NIC. Whether the motherboard bios supports it is open to some questioning. If I were the OP, I'd go dig through the MB manufacturer's site for references to "WOL" "wake on lan" and BIOS firmware upgrades.
2. The BIOS has to be set to enable something like "Wake On LAN" or "Wake on PME" , which is a wake on power management event.
3. I bought an ASUS MB with ECC support. I consider this crucial for data integrity, which is why I'm doing this in the first place. The onboard network interface is a Realtek 8111F. The later versions of FreeBSD and hence FreeNAS do support WOL on the RT8111F, but anecdotal evidence says it's erratic. I could never get it to work. Yet.
3. There is an OS dependency. This is the device driver layer. The OS device driver for the network interface has to support setting the NIC for wake on lan readiness. If the OS does not do this when it's shutting down - leave the NIC "loaded" for WOL, it won't work even if the motherboard, BIOS and NIC support WOL and are set up correctly. This can be set up and checked by the ifconfig command in the shell in FreeBSD and by extension FreeNAS. Variants of this command tell you what is configured in the NIC driver, and whether it supports WOL and/or is configured for it to work properly.
4. Once you're through that morass, there is a sending dependency. You have to be able to send the magic packet. While this is theoretically easy, I've had to bore my way right down to the packet levels on my house net to see if the magic packet is really being sent. It turns out, it wasn't. I've tried about six magic packet senders now, and only two of them actually sent magic packets on my network setup. That's because...
5. Your network router matters, as does where you send from. Most home routers do support sending a magic packet to a broadcast address, which is how this is supposed to work. However, most of them do not tell you how to do that, or that it's dependent on how many devices are supported on the subnet, and what the subnet definitions are. There are interactions between the sending software, the OS that is running on, and whether the magic packet is broadcastable by the router on the appropriate. subnet.
6. Where you are sending from matters. It's much easier to WOL on your own subnet. What everyone wants to do is to WOL from anywhere on the planet by sending a WOL packet to the intended machine through the internet. For security reasons, nearly all routers either preclude this entirely, or make it the subject of its own little "game" to get the bits and settings right. I got lucky on this one because I *don't* want my NAS to be bootable from the network in any form or fashion. But other people do, and some of them have even made it work. If you want to do WON, you must also set up your router to put a fixed address for the intended box, to avoid the router "forgetting" where it is, as most routers do a few minutes after the box is powered off.
7. Your magic packet sending software matters. Some of them work on some operating systems, others don't, and some appear to work, but don't really send the packet even if they say they do.
8. Finally, the actual magic packet you send is critical. Get the bits wrong, and the box will do what it does if any of the preceding bits are wrong - sit in magnificant and solemn silence. You have to know and get right the unique identifier for the NIC in the box to be booted. This MAC address is critical because the box is powered off and responds only to its right-down-to-the-bare-medal MAC address, not an IP address.
So that's where I've gotten. I'm working on the NIC layer, having scrubbed most of that out now. I just gave up on the RT8111F NIC on the motherboard, and bought an intel PWLA8391GT PRO/1000 GT NIC because of its reputation for "just works, no muss, no fuss" reputation.
You guessed it - it doesn't work. There is some bit at one of the layers that is not there yet.
