@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.