Wake on LAN on Dell T20 (Intel 82579) with FreeBSD 10.1

moogle

moogle

Hello,

I am new to FreeBSD and have a small problem. I installed FreeBSD with ZFS on my Dell T20 and everything works as expected, except the Wake on LAN. It uses the em driver which should support WOL.

Here are the facts:
  • If I start the PC and shut it down during the boot (before FreeBSD is booted) -> WOL works
  • If I boot into FreeBSD and force it to shutdown with long pressing the power button -> WOL works
  • If I shut it down with shutdown -p (I also tried shutdown -h, halt, power button, etc.) -> WOL doesn't work
My guess is, that FreeBSD somehow deactivates the NIC and that disables the WOL capabilities of the NIC.

As I said, I am new to FreeBSD and do not know exactly how the shutdown works, so I hope you guys can help me.
 
I use WOL to wake a NAS system. Over the last few months, I have noticed that now it sometimes requires sending the magic packet again. No specific idea about when or how that happened, but I do know that FreeBSD does not disable WOL.
 
It could be something specific to the NIC that when the BIOS initializes it all WOL options are on and when FreeBSD initializes it not all WOL options are on. Try seeing what WOL options are set with ifconfig <interface> and look under options. Try enabling all of them with ifconfig <interface> wol and shutting down after that to see if they are preserved. Take a look at man ifconfig | less -p wol to go straight to the different types that can be enabled.
 
I'm having the same problem as moogle: the T20 wasn't responding to the WOL packet even though WOL was configured in the BIOS, the NIC's status lights were active, and I could see the packet on the wire.

I temporarily fixed it by disabling WOL in the BIOS, applying the change, and then re-enabling it. However after booting up (into FreeNAS in my case), and then issuing a shutdown command to the system and waiting for it to turn off, it no longer responds to WOL.

Something seems to be disabling WOL functionality when the system is running or during shutdown. I didn't see anything in the ifconfig output, and ifconfig em0 wol says that it doesn't support it. Maybe the driver is disabling it...?
 
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