Wake-on-LAN (WOL) with Airport Extreme (2013)


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Has anyone had any luck using wake-on-lan with Apple's Airport Extreme Base Stations? I'm using their latest generation (taller rectangular version released this year) and have got WOL to work while on the LAN, but when remotely trying to wake my PC over the internet using magic packets I cannot seem to get any success.

 

Anyone shed some light on this mystery for me please?

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And what are you forwarding to think you can get wol from the wan to work?

Your router needs to have support for this to work.

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I forwarded upd port 9 to the local IP of the PC. it's of course connected via Ethernet cable. I set up a static local ip as well and still can't get it to wake. there's an option in the airport utility to enabled all connection from WAN. should I enable this or is this to manage devices such as locally connected hard disks remotely?

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Heres the thing your forwarding to what mac? Your router needs to know the mac address of of the local IP to be able to forward too it.

Your router needs specific support for WOL to work, you need to be able to create static arp entries or you need to be able to forward to the broadcast address, etc.

For example my router has ability to connect to it remotely and then send wol packets to boxes behind it

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post-14624-0-37644200-1384114327.png

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I set my static local DHCP leased IP to my MAC address of the PC I want to wake.  It's an Apple router but a custom PC running windows 7 64-bit SP1.  The NIC is setup to accept WOL packets.  I don't know where to look in the router settings for a WOL options.  What's the broadcast IP for my device? It uses an A and B 10 range IP for the device and DCHP leasing. I think the it's out from 10.0.1.1- 10.0.1.200 and it keeps the remaining 55 IP's private.

 

I didn't see anything for WOL in the device. With my prior router I would just SSH into the console and use a -wol command line entry to the device mac address through an app on my phone.  Can I connect to an Airport Extreme router in that same way? Does it use a BusyBox backend? 

 

Don't see options for that in Airport Utility either (the program that seems to interface the device, also designed by Apple)

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Its an Apple -- you can not be serious about this "Does it use a BusyBox backend?" ;) heheheeheh

I would assume if your using a /24, ie 255.255.255.0 mask on your 10.0.1.0/24 address then your broadcast address would be 10.0.1.255

If you set a reservation for your machine in the AEBS what did you set for a lease time, I would think once the lease expires it would forget all about the mac.

I don't believe the AEBS, or for that matter most routers will allow you to forward to broadcast address.

Do you not have 1 box you can leave on? Then you can just get to it and then send your WOL from the local lan.. For example cheap pogoplug or raspberry pi would work.

Just use a real router and use your AEBS as an AP ;)

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LOL! Love your sense of humour! :) If i didn't have all these Apple wireless devices that just talk to "apple airport" chipset/ firmware flawlessly I would probably have grabbed some newer model openWRT asus router and dropped pfsense on it like yours has.  I was running gargoyle on a tp-link but it was dropping signal with my apple tv/ airport express (for streaming music to speakers) and ipads constantly. This AEBS is definitely what I needed in terms of a strong/ stable connection now to all my apple hardware (minus obvious PC). Range and everything was increased!  However Raspberry Pi, that's super low power consumption yeah?  I essentially didn't want to run my desktop 24/7 with dual SLI setup and overclocked components (that power draw).  But this R-Pi sounds like a good idea!

 

How would I set it up to essentially wake my other system? Just RDP into it? and use what client side to wake the desktop?

 

Thanks for all the help by the way!

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What does your gateway to your network have to do with what you use for wireless? If you have apple products that work best with wireless apple, then yeah use your AEBS for wireless.. But use whatever you want as your router, put openwrt on it, dd-wrt. Use a pc or vm and run pfsense, etc.

Your wireless does not, and to be honest shouldn't even be part of your gateway device. Just use your AEBS as wireless Accesspoint, not as your router off your network.

But yeah the pi, uses nothing for power.. just ssh into it, open a forward for ssh to its IP.. Then when you want to wake up your desktop, just ssh to your pi, and send your wol from there to what you want to wake up.

If you want to get fancy with it you could setup a knock so you send a specific packet or hit it on a specific port and it sends a wol packet to your machine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_knocking

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I think the raspberry pi ssh method and running a -wol command to wake the MAC ID on the desktop will work a treat! All the information I got from you guys helped greatly!

 

Thank you both!

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if the pi is a bit hard to get a hold of, a pogoplug works as well. You can enable ssh on them, and if need be there is info about running full arch linux on them. Should be able to pick one up anywhere and only around $25 as well.

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