PC wont reliably wake on lan

[fooonair]

Hello

I need your assistance with wake on lan.

hardware
Asrock b75m B75 mobo, realtek NIC onboard, win 7 x64.

issues
I could wake the pc before so i assume the tools are working and the configuration is correct. Wol in the bios is active and the option in the nic driver in the OS too. The system is setup to enter sleep mode automatically.

The last attempts to wake the pc up were unsuccessful though. The sleep led was buzzing but sending the magic packet didn't do anything.

What could interfere with wakeup? Is there maybe a bios bug? Or an OS/driver issue?

 

[Shadowjk]

It could be a driver issue or it may be caused by a firewall blocking the relevant port. Try to temporarily disable your firewall and test.

Also, try the wake on LAN from a clean boot mode (Bar any applications that are needed in order to get it to work) and see if that resolves anything. If it does then a third party application will be interfering.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/179159-troubleshoot-application-conflicts-performing-clean-startup.html

Josh

 

[fooonair]

Hi josh

I'll try that in the next days.

I had a few more thoughts.

• does it matter which sleep mode i set in the power options
• why does the pc seem to wake from soft off but not from sleeping
• why does the bios hang when fast boot is enabled

Concerning the 2nd point i cant nail it down now. But i think that's the case.
Point 3 seems a bios bug and maybe bad asrock programming. WOL maybe erratic in the bios too

 

[fooonair]

Update with an event from yesterday

After watching a movie the system went to sleep. I wanted to wake it but couldn't. Three WOL attempts didn't do it. I pressed the power button to turn it off. It was late and i went to bed. A few mins. after the shutdown the pc suddenly rebooted. About three times. As if the magic packets had been delayed and transmitted all at once sequentially.

 

[fooonair]

update from now

Most of the time the machine to be woken on lan isn't connected to a display. I noticed today that the PC had gone into hibernation instead of shutting down. When I pressed the power button today it said resuming windows.

The next steps I did were checking that

• in the NIC driver wake up options are active which they were
• looking at the power option settings which are configured as follows: sleep: after 30 mins.; hibernate: on, allow hybrid sleep: never
• bios options: wake on lan: enabled; wake by pci: enabled; acpi suspend type: s5

Now I shut the PC down via start menu in Windows. After that I sent a magic packet with Fing, an Android app. The PC woke up fine and booted into Windows.

This apparently means that I don't have to disable any service or change any basic configuration because WOL is working. The router forwards the packet correctly. I only need WOL from LAN and not over the internet. The motherboard seems to power the NIC in off mode and recognize the magic packet correctly. The NIC driver is able to process the wake event.

But why the hell doesn't it wake up from sleep? I guess this includes sleep modes <5. The PC probably enters S3 or S4 and I can't wake it from that state.

When I scan the network and the consecutive wake event is successful I can usually see the target PC in my wake app. Even when it is powered off. Today I did the first scan when it was sleeping/hibernating. The scan app couldn't find the PC. Could it eventually be that the NIC is not powered when in S3-S4 but receives current in S5?

 

[Shadowjk]

Not that your NIC is not powered but rather a different packet is needed to wake a machine from different states. Also, from the machine sending the magic packet, have you tried restarting the service used to send that packet since in a production network that I previously worked on the request would only work if the service was restarted. That being said we only used wake from S5 state so I cannot comment on the previous states.

Either way my personal opinion is not to use it since it can be very inconsistent. Does it happen to any other machine? This can help determine where the cause is.

Josh

 

[fooonair]

This could be so much easier. Do you know which packet is required to wake from sleep? I could do a search for a software then. But i also was thinking in the direction of avoiding sleep and shutting down instead. Boot time is acceptable.

I have used 2 different wol tools from 2 different manufacturers on 2 different machines. One from my win 7 box and one on my android smartphone. Both work with wol from shutdown state and neither does with sleep mode.