Wake on LAN HP N40L w onboard and Intel NIC: not working

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hsaff

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Hi all,

frustration rises...
I got a HP N40L with the well-known onboard broadcom NIC. I made first NAS steps with 8.3.1 release with separate Intel NIC (em driver) where WoL worked from the very beginning. Now I upgraded to 9.2.1.6 and I can not get WoL working! I still searched forum and google and found:
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/wake-on-lan.13508/page-3
https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/3764
But none of the recipes worked for me, neither on the onboard broadcom NIC nor on the PCIe card Intel NIC. Just for verification I installed FreeBSD 10 on usb stick and WoL worked perfect (on the Intel NIC), even on tagged VLAN interfaces. WoL in BIOS for onboard NIC is enabled.
Advisories, suggestions, hints, links...everything welcome!
interface config:

em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=4219b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWTSO>
ether 68:05:ca:13:45:0f
nd6 options=9<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED>
media: Ethernet autoselect
status: no carrier
bge0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=82080<VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,LINKSTATE>
ether a0:b3:cc:e2:53:62
nd6 options=9<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED>
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
ipfw0: flags=8801<UP,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 65536
nd6 options=9<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED>
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
options=600003<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0xa
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
vlan3: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
ether a0:b3:cc:e2:53:62
inet 192.168.1.98 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
nd6 options=9<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED>
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
vlan: 3 parent interface: bge0
vlan4: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1496
ether a0:b3:cc:e2:53:62
inet 10.0.0.98 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
nd6 options=9<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED>
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
vlan: 4 parent interface: bge0

Regards
 

cyberjock

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Advisories, suggestions, hints, links...everything welcome!

Ok.. my advise... stop trying to bend FreeNAS to work with WoL. FreeNAS is designed as an always-on appliance. Using it outside of its designed function is not always a smart idea. Many people get in over their heads before they realize they screwed up by trying to use it outside of its design.
 

hsaff

Dabbler
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Messages
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Ok.. my advise... stop trying to bend FreeNAS to work with WoL. FreeNAS is designed as an always-on appliance. Using it outside of its designed function is not always a smart idea. Many people get in over their heads before they realize they screwed up by trying to use it outside of its design.

Ok...but could you please give a short explanation why decision is made to remove or disable WoL from FreeNAS? As most home users do not need 24/7 operation it meeans the NAS is runnning about 6 to 8 hours during night without any use. I see the implication for corporate use if there are some more advanced users who play around and maybe cause unwanted wake of servers, but from the FreeBSD base I assume by default it is enabled. So in the FreeNAS distro it must explicitly disabled. Could it maybe added as an optional choice in the GUI? Or maybe a short description posted on how to enable it?
My idea is to shutdown the box e.g. at 12 am and power it on with WoL in the morning either manually from any other machine or via a Cron job on the router. In addition it means for small businesses a big saving on power and money. E.g. a small Nas with approx. 20W per hour consumes 960 Wh per weekend for nothing if no one is in the office or accessing it.

...Maybe a selling point for iX as well...

Regards
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
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Ok...but could you please give a short explanation why decision is made to remove or disable WoL from FreeNAS? As most home users do not need 24/7 operation it meeans the NAS is runnning about 6 to 8 hours during night without any use. I see the implication for corporate use if there are some more advanced users who play around and maybe cause unwanted wake of servers, but from the FreeBSD base I assume by default it is enabled. So in the FreeNAS distro it must explicitly disabled. Could it maybe added as an optional choice in the GUI? Or maybe a short description posted on how to enable it?
My idea is to shutdown the box e.g. at 12 am and power it on with WoL in the morning either manually from any other machine or via a Cron job on the router. In addition it means for small businesses a big saving on power and money. E.g. a small Nas with approx. 20W per hour consumes 960 Wh per weekend for nothing if no one is in the office or accessing it.

...Maybe a selling point for iX as well...

Regards

FreeNAS does all sorts of maintenance even if it's not being actively used and not all of it can be rescheduled.
 

cyberjock

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The short answer is that FreeNAS/TrueNAS is targeted for large-scale deployments. It requires server-grade hardware and isn't short on the pocketbook when you need to buy hardware. Virtually everything about FreeNAS screams "high-end" and expecting it to meet some home-user's small-scale solution is just asking for trouble. That being said, if you are expecting FreeNAS to meet your needs despite the fact that you aren't the ideal consumer for FreeNAS, feel free. My original post was simply trying to explain to you that you are going to fight an uphill battle and may lose your data if you don't have a deep understanding of what is going on. This forum knows well enough that many people have lost many pools because they "knew better" and "demanded that they save a little electricity". As one of my friends on this forum would say "if you are expecting low wattage, cheap, non-24x7 usage then 'these aren't the droids you are looking for' and he'd be correct."

Small business are big on saving on power and money, but spending even $15 a month on electricity is a drop in the bucket. My server, which has over 40TB of storage costs me less than $20 a month in electricity. While you make the argument that weekends the server would be doing "nothing" I'd say you are gravely mistaken. That time is when you do your scheduled maintenance- SMART testing, ZFS scrubs, backups from other servers to this one, backups of this one to others, etc. Sorry, but even if I keep my server of 50% of the time, I'm still looking at saving a whole $10. Sorry, but that's inconsequential when spending $2k+ on just hardware.
 

hsaff

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ok for both points. See the implications and even the danger of data loss during shutdown. But after all I miss a comment in the manual that iX has made the decision to explicitly disable WoL. From the 9.2.1 manual, chapter 1.3.5:
'Wake on LAN (WOL) support is dependent upon the FreeBSD driver for the interface. If the driver
supports WOL, it can be enabled using ifconfig(8).'

But from what I read in the discussions it is disabled by intention! Should be mentioned in my eyes.

Regards
 

cyberjock

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It's not disabled by intention. It's just not enabled by default. Notice the comment "if the driver supports WOL, it can be enabled using ifconfig." No network driver I'm aware of enabled WOL by default. The default config is a basic "this just works" and it is up to you, the adminstrator of your server, to enable features like WOL, LACP, offload checksumming, etc. Much of the hardware in existence does NOT support WOL by default in FreeBSD because of the driver.

But nowhere does it say (nor did iX) deliberately disable WOL.

This is precisely why I deliberately avoid get into these WOL threads. People expect it to work and are outraged when it doesn't, they then argue that the small user needs it, that it should be enabled by default, etc.

Well played sir. You sucked me in. ;)

The bottom line is WOL is totally unsupported and you can do so at your own risk (or benefit). If that isn't satisfying enough then FreeNAS may not be the product you are looking for. WOL is a complex beast and is not for the faint at heart nor those that don't understand the underlying technology on where your NIC gets power, how the NIC actually tells the motherboard to wake up, etc.
 

hsaff

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Messages
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Well played sir. You sucked me in. ;)

...to be honest...sometimes I like to play around in discussions, but at the moment my only interest is, why the .... WoL is not working on none of both NICs. If it can not be enabled by design, ok, than this is the way it is. But not to know why, drive me nuts. :mad:

Regards
 

cyberjock

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I don't know either. WOL has a slew of components that all must work in unison (some of it is hardware stuff like your motherboard must support WOL on the PCIe slot and your PSU must provide the required amount of power for the PCIe NIC). If any part of that doesn't work then it's a no-go. Even with everything else right.

With stuff that's more than about 18 months old my experience has been that if you didn't buy the hardware specifically to support WoL it probably doesn't. This includes your PSU, motherboard and NIC (if not using the onboard). Of course, you might find you have all the necessary components by pure dumb luck, but that's just dumb luck. Newer stuff, so long as it's "good quality", not bargain bin priced stuff and not AMD (I don't do AMD so I won't try to include them in this) seems to generally have support. Not always, but generally.

For people that don't do WoL all the time trying to set it up is non-trivial. That's before you deal with problems like using a relatively obscure OS like FreeBSD/FreeNAS instead of Windows and before you deal with potential hardware problems.
 

hsaff

Dabbler
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Jul 19, 2014
Messages
21
One last post to close the thread that is maybe interessting for the other HP N36L, N40L, N54L owners: none of the patches for the onboard NIC worked for me, but with the Intel Pro 1000 NIC and commenting out 2 (!) lines:
# /sbin/ifconfig -l | /usr/bin/xargs -n 1 -J % /sbin/ifconfig % down
# sleep 5
in /conf/base/etc/rc.shutdown WoL is available again (don't forget to 'mount -uw /' to override write protection). Just tested with release 9.2.1 due to the other threads.

Tested with 9.2.1.6 as well and works, even with tagged VLAN!

Regards
 
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Snake3y3s

Explorer
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Any idea if this will work on the latest implementation of FreeNAS (FreeNAS 11)
 
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