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WOL Wake-on-LAN

Posted: 22 Jun 2014, 02:20
by feist
Hello,

I finally got WOL working on one of our catalog computers. It seems WOL is very touchy and is hit and miss on some systems, but it's such a time saving and valuable feature if it does work for you.

1. You will need to enable WOL in your system BIOS. Turning it on in the BIOS only really tells the computer to make that option available to the operating system. The OS, or software component, still needs to tell the NIC to look for the magic packet to wake up when the computer is off. You will need to add ethtool to Porteus Kiosk to gain the software component.

2. Download ethtool from a Slackware repository. I found mine here:
http://slackbuilds.org/mirror/slackware ... i486-1.txz

3. Convert the TXZ file to XZM. Since I don't have Porteus Desktop installed, I extracted the TXZ file into its own folder called ethtool using Archive Manager on Debian and then I used terminal to squash the ethtool folder like so:
mksquashfs ethtool ethtool-3.10-i486-1.xzm -b 256K -noappend

4. Copy and paste the ethtool-3.10-i486-1.xzm module into your kiosk's modules or XZM folder. The location for my extracted ISO is:
/porteus/modules

5. We need run ethtool everytime the computer starts so that the NIC knows to look for the magic packet when off. Open up a text editor and write:
#!/bin/sh
echo "Setting Wake-on-LAN to Enabled"
/usr/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g

6. We need to save the file and make it excutable. Create the folders as necessary so that the file is saved to:
/porteus/rootcopy/etc/rc.d/rc.local
Make the rc.local file executable by running in terminal:
sudo chmod +x rc.local

7. Once the script is executable, you can build the ISO image by running make_iso.sh in /porteus of the extracted ISO directory. Don't forget to run the isohybrid command on the newly created ISO image file!

8. dd the new ISO to your kiosk and reboot the system to allow the script to run ethtool and enable WOL on the kiosk's NIC.

9. Shutdown your kiosk and run a WOL tool on another computer on the same LAN subnet to send the magic packet to your kiosk's NIC. You will need to know your kiosk's MAC address. I use MC-WOL for DOS from http://www.matcode.com/wol.htm
I then wrote a simple batch file listing all of the kiosks and added the batch file to the startup folder on one of our staff Windows computer. Example:
MC-WOL AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
MC-WOL FF:EE:DD:CC:BB:AA

10. Now that you have the ability to turn your kiosks on automatically just by logging into your work computer, wouldn't it be great if you could schedule the kiosks to shutdown automatically too? Customize and add the shutdown schedule to the same rc.local file you created earlier:
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php? ... 199#p15055

PS: My knowledge of Linux is very minimal, but I was so happy to get this working on some of our kiosks I had to share. There might be some errors so if there are some improvements that can be made, please share!