How I got my Linksys WRT54G to Broadcast WOL Packets to my LAN
In my particular set up I have a cable modem, piping internet to a VOIP router piping internet to a wireless Linksys WRT54G router piping internet to my machine.
I wanted to be able to turn on my computer at home without having to call my dear wife and ask her to march downstairs and fire it up. Here are the steps that I performed to make it work:
- Prep the NIC Card: Start>Control Panel>Network Connections>Local Area Connection>Properties>Configure> Then looked around for Wake Up, Wake On LAN, settings under the advanced tab and made sure that everything was enabled for magic packets.
Then I went into the power management tab and unchecked the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" checkbox.
- Prep the Motherboard: While my computer is booting I see the Dell logo and some text about how to get into settings or BIOS (typically F2 or F10 or F something). Once I was inside the BIOS I looked around for settings in regard to Wake on LAN sometimes abbreviated WOL. I made sure that WOL was enabled.
- Prep the Routers: This is where it gets interesting. Linksys doesn't natively support forwarding ports to the broadcast IP of 255 (you get some JavaScript error "IP value is out of range [0 - 254]"), so to get around it you can try one of two methods (they both worked for me):
1) I used firefox and DOM Inspector to change the value of the IP for port forwarding thereby circumventing the Javasacript validation. You have to have DOMI installed in Firefox, then inspect the page with the port forwarding for applications and gaming, then right-click the value in DOMI, choose edit, and set it to 255. After that is complete just save the settings.
2) I also tried saving the html page and modifying the form manually. This also worked like a charm. You need to remember to change the action property of the form to prepend the url of the router. If your router was 192.168.1.1 then your form tag might be <form name="portRange" action="http://192.168.1.1/PortRange.tri" method="post"> assuming PortRange.tri was what you orginally found in the form. You also need to change the value of the IP you're forwarding to be 255. This is what my HTML looked like when I was done:
<input class="num" onblur="check_valid_value(this,0,254,errmsg.err34,this.defaultValue,lanip,networkip,broadcastip)" maxlength="3" size="3" value="255" name="ip1">
On the VOIP router I just forwarded the port I decided to use as the Linksys WRT54G which forwards to the broadcast on my LAN.
Wait, what UDP port am I forwarding you ask? It doesn't really matter. Typically WOL is on 7 or 9 but as long as you pick a port that isn't being used by another application (in other words pick something really high) then you're probably just fine. - Test the setup: So, to test the Wake on LAN settings I used this WOL monitor and wrote my own application for sending packets. Why would I write my own packet sender? Because I couldn't find one out there that didn't apply the subnet mask to the IP and broadcast the message. With my setup I wanted the packet to go directly to my VOIP router, so I built my own WOL application. It's pretty simple:
If you're having a hard time getting WOL to work for you, then try this forum to get your particular issue sorted out.
Update:05/27/2010
New! I have an Android App available for WoL and WoW. It's called WoL Wake on Lan Wan. Check it out here: http://blog.benfinnigan.com/2010/05/android-market-update-wol-wake-on-lan.html
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog entry are provided "as-is" with no guarantee expressed or implied. If tweaking this stuff bricks your box or your router I'm not responsible. Any sites I've linked to are not to be construed as an endorsement and I cannot be held responsible for anything that goes on within other internet sites and their products or forums.
