I am trying to set up my homelab to boot whenever it is being accessed. I set up wake on LAN for unicast, and it works fine for a while after shutting down the system. It stops working after a few hours of the server being turned off, though.
From what I’m gathering online, the issue is that my router uses an ARP cache. Before that gets flushed, it still works. However, it seems like my router does not allow me to configure a static ARP entry (using a ISP provided router). I already set a static IP for my server in the router, but it still won’t work a few hours.
Is there any way to make this work? I just want to allow a friend of mine to boot my server whenever they try to access a service on it.
You need to send the WOL packet to the broadcast address of your network, not to the machine IP address. It this way all the machines on the network will receive it, including the ones that have been powered off for a while
I am talking about WoL in unicast mode, not with the magic packet.
Im curious, why unicast over magic packet?
Because I want the server to boot when a service on said server is being accessed. Without having to manually boot it before.
I’m not familiar with this setup. But do you want for the server to boot as soon as it receive any packet addressed to its IP?
Yup. And it works already, as long as the server was shut down in the last few hours. Then it stops working. The 4 hours mentioned here seem about right.