Wake on lan not working

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,176
Intel Quad Server Card which also supports WOL doesn't work either
It's a pretty niche feature, unfortunately. It seems to break more often than not.
 

heller44

Cadet
Joined
Sep 25, 2021
Messages
2
I have been having a bit of a fight getting WOL working with a new mainboard installed, MSI z590-a which also uses the Intel® I225-V 2.5Gb chip.

Tried almost everything I could to get it working, and have tried both truenas core 12.0-U8.1 and then core 13.0-U2 both resulting in no WOL.

ifconfig is happily showing that the option is there.

Last thing I tried was to change from Core, to Scale-22.02.3. Only did a manual upgrade, not fresh install. No issues or data loss, and Wake on Lan is now working fine.

Hopefully this is an option for others.
 

xyls

Cadet
Joined
Aug 17, 2022
Messages
2
This is a radical approach)
I hope the developers are reading the forum and will fix this problem in the next releases.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
I hope the developers are reading the forum and will fix this problem in the next releases.

The developers do not generally read the forum, and over the last decade no significant effort has been put into trying to correct this. It's a niche feature that's overly stupidly complex and no real value to the paying customers. I wouldn't expect to see it magically fixed unless someone gets ambitious and tears apart upstream FreeBSD WoL support and reworks it.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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Nov 25, 2013
Messages
7,740
@jgreco Can you enlighten me about how WoL can be in any way OS dependent? I used to assume that's strictly a hardware/BIOS feature completely independent of the OS. Switched off is switched off - what's the OS got to deal with in that state? Then you send a magic packet and the firmware powers up the machine.

No?

Thanks!
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
@jgreco Can you enlighten me about how WoL can be in any way OS dependent? I used to assume that's strictly a hardware/BIOS feature completely independent of the OS. Switched off is switched off - what's the OS got to deal with in that state? Then you send a magic packet and the firmware powers up the machine.

No?

Thanks!

You're sort of asking the wrong person about this. I'd like to think myself familiar with lots of esoteric ethernet stuff, I even still have some WD8003 (8 bit ISA) cards with custom boot ROM's, still had a little AUI stuff in service until earlier this year, and if you needed a quad 10Mbps or quad 10/100Mbps card, I'm the guy with inventory... but WoL has really never been of much interest to me because I typically don't power gear down.

However, I'm a survivor of a number of firefights on this topic on these forums over the years, and my general recollection is that Intel's ethernet chipset driver (em, igb, etc) disables WoL by default, and you have to manually configure this via an ifconfig option to get it to work. If you don't set this option, and you power down, no magic packet can wake up your PC unless it happens to be able to reach out the front of the PC and press the power button. This doesn't seem to work in many cases, though. I've heard various explanations as to why this is, but all of them seem somewhat unfortunate or unlikely. I could buy that the Linux support is better because more Linux users are focused on desktop operations while FreeBSD folk are more server oriented. That one has the ring of truth while not explaining why a mainstream chipset that is commonly integrated into boards like Supermicro and Intel does not seem to support it correctly. Under FreeBSD. My interpretation of things I've heard and seen is that it is something no one on Team FreeBSD has tried to comprehensively solve.

You're on your own.
 
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