NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi all

I have recently installed NASLite-2 USB on an Asrock K7S41GX Socket A mobo with the above mentionned on board network. I have also flashed to latest bios.

I got a vbscript from these forums to enable me to shut down the server, however what I now need is the ability to WOL the server to bring it back up.

I use the poweroff utility on my windows boxes with success but the NASLite box will not respond to WOL packets.

I have read that people have had success in getting WOL working on their setups with no config changes to NASLite and the manual for my mobo says WOL is supported so I was wondering if there was any way to turn the option on for my setup (I read in a couple of linux type forums that a few commands need to be run to turn the option on) ?

I would use a PCI card but there is no WOL header on the mobo so this would be of no use.

Any suggestions welcome!

Thanks
Micz.

WOL is a function of your hardware and BIOS. It has nothing to do with the OS since the OS is not running with the PC powered down.

I know the OS is not running when the PC is off

However, if it's anything like my windows boxes, the PC needs to have wol enabled in BIOS and in Windows for the WOL to work and actually switch the PC on.

Thanks
Micz.

Like the man said - it has nothing to do with the OS.

Are you using the WOL utility correctly? Are you using the correct MAC address? What ip address and subnet mask are you sending the magic packet to? Try sending it to the LAN broadcast address and see what happens.

And what I'd like to know is - where in Windows do you enable WOL?

Maybe he's referring to something like these:

http://www.box.net/public/10lzheoht6

That's an interesting box - but that's specifying the link speed - and the reason I asked is that I happen to KNOW that WOL works with no setup requirements in the OS - remember the OS is not running when the NIC receives the WOL packet.

About ten - fifteen years ago IBM released a product called LCCM - LAN Client Control Manager - and using that I could ship a new PC, with or without the OS to a remote office, have a member of staff unbox and set it up - all I needed to know is the MAC address of the unit.

I could sit at my desk and power it on, flash the BIOS to the latest version and then deploy the latest Windows image, with all the applications - all done over the WAN.

So - if there is no OS - and WOL works, then WOL is OS independent.

I'm guessing that these are for waking windows from one of its suspended modes.

You're absolutely right, completely OS independent.

On a smaller scale than your setup, I set up 2 or 3 boxes for WOL about a year ago. All 3 had a "wake on lan" bios option, but I learned this was a legacy setting for very old lan cards which entailed connecting an external wire from a mobo point (which needed to supply 1 amp! in standby) to the card.

I needed to use relatively modern pci 100Mbit cards, so looking further in the BIOS there was a "Power on by pci" option. That did the trick for all but 1 box. It had a firewire card, & although the driver had a parameter list in a dialogue box similar to the lan pic's I posted, there was no way to select an individual register enable bit for a specific card. Instead they were all OR'd together. So, although it initially appeared to work, as the firewire bus is peer to peer, (the nodes relaying traffic) when any data flowed, the box woke up

That LCCM sounds like it was a very useful tool.

I have a simple tool on OS X which has a list of MAC addresses, & click on the box (pc or mac) I need to activate.

Is it possible that WOL is not working due to the ACPI "Off" state NL uses? I'm not familiar with the ACPI spec but I believe there are several soft off states as well as a real, hard off. Is it possible NL uses the hard off instead of one of the soft offs? That might explain why WOL doesn't work.

I, too, cannot get WOL to work. My Realtek based network card supports WOL through a new enough PCI slot. My 2000 vintage Gateway motherboard doesn't have a specific BIOS WOL option but does have a PCI Power Management Event option. It also has several ACPI power off options- Fast Wake and Low Power. I have found no combinations that allow my PC to wake the NAS upon sending of the magic packet.

Tony or Ralph: what power off state does NL use? If a hard off can an option be added to a soft off instead?

Take a look here to see if any of it helps:

http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-008459.htm

Part of that explains a bit more about why those WOL options exist in the pic's I posted.

Thanks for the link. It's the first explanation I seen of what all the Sx states are. Unfortunately none of the info there helped. As far as I can tell my hardware supports WOL and I have everything set up right yet it doesn't work. I did try moving the Enet card to different slots but that didn't help.

Hi all

Sorry I have not been back into this recently, I have been busy starting a new job.

I will look into using a name brand PCI card and trying the magic packets again, I read the intel information and it possibly answered a few questions for me.

Because the NIC is onboard there appears to be no appendable settings other than turning it on or off through the BIOS! I will buy a newish card and play around for a bit. I do have the wakeup by PME option in BIOS.

However, I have noticed that the link light stays on when the PC is off, so I would expect it to answer to WOL...

Thanks
Micz.

I think this is where my problem is. In my case the LAN card is completely off which is why, I suppose, it doesn't wake up when commanded.

I previously used this same LAN card in an even older PC. When NL shutdown, the drives turned off but the power supply fan was still on and the LAN card did respond to a ping. I didn't try magic packets with that one. As I recall there were no ACPI options in the BIOS.

This is the kind of stuff that I have been reading on a few linux sites about turning WOL on under linux:

http://ahh.sourceforge.net/wol/faq.html

It would be nice to see Tony or Ralph comment on this, hint, hint.

I think that the initial answers provided were in fact pretty accurate. The function should be controlled by the hardware. Specifically, the ACPI implementation of the board as well as the NIC and it's associated firmware.

There are some things one can do via software to affect the settings of the ACPI or NIC Firmware state, but that is mostly chipset specific and really outside the scope of NASLite.

We'll take a closer look at that, but it is really not a high priority at this time.