Obviously, this also means that you device (computer) needs to support going to standby, and have BIOS and/or driver support to handle a “power on” signal when the network card sees a correct Magic Packet. So be aware and not surprised to run out of juice before you can use your laptop for example. Since Wifi is often used in mobile devices, then this would mean that your battery keeps being drained, for those devices that support Wake On Lan over WiFi. The network card needs to be powered by your computer, even when the computer is in standby, and should be able to monitor network traffic on a defined port, so it can catch an incoming Magic Packet and see if it’s intended for this computer (MAC address). To enable Wake on Lan, your network card (or WiFi card) needs to be Wake On Lan compatible – and not all of them are (especially very cheap or “older” network cards).

Test the tool by sending the Wake On Lan Packet and verify that your device fires up.Find a WOL tool that can send the Wake on Lan packets.Write down the Mac Address of the device you’d like to wake up – miniWOL does not need this, but most other applications do.Enable Wake On Lan on te device which you’d like to wake up.To get started with Wake On Lan, you’ll need to follow these steps: Normally just one single packet should do the trick, but most Wake On Lan applications actually send more than one packet – just to make sure. The Magic Packet ( UDP) is typically send to port 9, some systems default to port 7, and some systems allow you to define your own port number. That’s why a standard was defined with data of a specific format – the so called “Magic Packet”. While the NIC (network interface controller) is listening, a lot of traffic might pass that might not even be intended for this network connection, so just listening to network traffic would keep your network device awake even when you don’t want it to be awake. To be able to use Wake On Lan, yoru computer requires the network card of this device to be semi-awake, and still listen to traffic when the computer is in standby, just in case a “ magic packet” is being send to the device. There can be several motivations to do this save on power, save on the environment, save on wear-and-tear of your equipment, etc. WOL is probably most commonly used to wake up a server or NAS, just before access to these machines is needed – for example a media server, which can sleep all day long until you want to watch a movie.

This means for example your home network. Wake On LAN, or WOL, is a Ethernet standard that allows you to “wake up” computers or network devices that are in stand-by, and is originally intended for use in a local network.

7 Trouble Shooting Wake On Lan - Sniffing Packets.

5 Tools to Wake Up your Network Device with WOL.

3 Power Management - Standby and Wake Up.

Mac not waking for network access