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.
Why shutdown the homelab in the first place? Are you trying to save on power consumption?
The other idea I had was to use another lower power device spoofing the server’s Mac. But it seems like it would require an ethernet hub and those don’t really exist anymore.
Yes, electricity is expensive here and I don’t use it daily.