WOL - Wake on LAN in FreeNAS 8.2 and further ?

[pierrep]

Hi there,

so now that i have a WOL capable router (namely a Tomato firmware on a Netgear router), i'd like to use it.

- Found my NIC is capable (through ifconfig)
- found no specific config in FreeNAS
- set up my BIOS

and... does not work

looked up here, no real relevant topic
looked up support.freenas.org and found a few change sets as well as :
- defect #878 seta as major and a bit under 1 year old
- defect #908 set as major and also close to 1 year old
- enchancement #125 set as minor opened 20 months ago (Jan 2011)

no owner on any of these although the enhancement has received some support in the comments

so what is the state of the art with Wake on LAN on FreeNAS ??

Anyone has a workaround until a "clean" solution is integrated in the standard FreeNAS distribution ?

thanks
Pierre

 

[Scareh]

wake on lan has nothing to do with freenas, it's essentially your hardware from your network card that wakes up your box.
Go look around in your bios-settings and activate the WOL feature there.

 

[pierrep]

thanks for the input.
you make a good point although i remember reading some things (other than the bug track ids provided) about the driver...

i did activate the feature in the BIOS...
anyway will do more testing and look elsewhere as it's indeed most probably not freenas related

EDIT :
more testing does not do anything more.
But more research uncovered 2 intel support pages (backed by actual hint text in the BIOS itself) that show the OS/LAN drivers must support and be configured for Wake On LAN

generic wake-up basiscs page
specific page for my motherboard

from which i can excerpt :

Configuring Wake-on-LAN
Wake-on-LAN is a hardware/software solution allowing a computer to be woken up remotely. A computer that has an Internet connection and is Advanced Configuration Power Interface (ACPI) compliant, can be turned on remotely from anywhere in the world.

Wake-on-LAN must be enabled in the desktop board BIOS and then configured in the operating system.

To enable Wake-on-LAN in the BIOS:

Press F2 during boot to enter BIOS Setup.
Go to the Power menu.
Set Wake-on-LAN to Power On.
Save by pressing F10 and exit the BIOS Setup.
To configure Wake-on-LAN in the operating system:

Click Start > Settings > Control Panel.
Double-click System.
Go to the Hardware tab and click Device Manager.
Expand the Network Adapters section.
Right-click your adapter and select Properties.
Go to the Advanced tab.
Select Wake-on-LAN Options and click Properties. Set the following:
Enable PME: set to Enabled
Wake on Settings: set to Wake on Magic Packet

so back to my initial question i guess ?
thanks in advance
Pierre

 

[pierrep]

OK, replying to myself with the last but not the least finding !!!

According to this FreeBSD forum thread, a patch was made for release 9 to fix an issue with my specific NIC.

This seems to be back-ported to 8.x but i'm not sure it's in 8.3, i'm not familiar enough with FreeBSD releases...

thanks in advance to anybody able to enlighten me on this

Pierre

 

[cyberjock]

There's probably a reason you haven't got much useful information from the forum. You must provide your network card model so we can help you. Someone may realize one of the tickets you linked to is regarding to 2 Intel NICs, but it's not a good idea to leave people to assume if you have either of those specific models. It'd be better to just provide the information in the post. Plus there's no way to know if you are using a PCI express addon card or not.

 

[William Grzybowski]

OK, replying to myself with the last but not the least finding !!!

According to this FreeBSD forum thread, a patch was made for release 9 to fix an issue with my specific NIC.

This seems to be back-ported to 8.x but i'm not sure it's in 8.3, i'm not familiar enough with FreeBSD releases...

thanks in advance to anybody able to enlighten me on this

Pierre

Yes, the fix made into 8.3...

 

[pierrep]

Yes, the fix made into 8.3...

Hello William,
thanks very much for the confirmation.
I'll be looking forward to install FreeNAS 8.3-RELEASE and check that out.

 

[polomora]

The original question touched on one side of the equation - waking up.

Does FreeNAS 8.3 also support suspend to ram? I have installed it on an old PC, that in a previous existence ran Windows XP, and suspend to ram and WOL both worked perfectly. I need it because of the slow startup times when booting from the USB drive,

 

[cyberjock]

I don't think suspend to RAM is supported.

But if your startup takes more than 5 minutes something is wrong. Even with USB2 it should move at a good speed. You should start a new thread and post FreeNAS version and hardware if it takes more than 5 minutes to bootup.

 

[polomora]

Thanks for the reply, noobsauce80.

It takes a long time to boot up, I timed it at about 2:50. Certainly much longer than the 10 seconds it used to take it wake up from suspend to ram state when running XP.

I need the fast startup time because I was planning to run SqueezeServer alongside the FreeNAS installation. I can't leave it running 24/7 - at 75W that will cost about €150/year. ;<(

I read on another forum that it was available on the 0.7 release, only for it to be removed for the 8.0 release. I would have imaged that most of the user base are home users, and would welcome such a feature.

Paul

 

[cyberjock]

Well, FreeNAS .7 was rebranded to NAS4Free. If suspend to RAM is a needed feature you could go to NAS4Free or put in a ticket for the feature at support.freenas.org.

 

[polomora]

Thanks for explaining the difference between the two.

 

[polomora]

If suspend to RAM is a needed feature you could go to NAS4Free or put in a ticket for the feature at support.freenas.org.

I think this was what the original poster had in mind:

looked up support.freenas.org and found a few change sets as well as :
- defect #878 seta as major and a bit under 1 year old
- defect #908 set as major and also close to 1 year old
- enchancement #125 set as minor opened 20 months ago (Jan 2011)​