I am trying to set up a simple home server with some old hardware, and since power is pretty expensive here I am trying to enable WoL so that I can turn it on whenever I need it, and automatically shut it down after a short time of inactivity.

I enabled WoL ("Power On By PME") in my BIOS, which then allowed me to enable WoL in my network device drivers using nmcli. It now reliably shows mode g selected after reboot, as reported by ethtool. I installed gWakeOnLan on another device to try waking my server, but to no avail.

When my server is shut down, the ethernet LEDs are still blinking, so I suppose the network device successfully stays turned on after shutdown. However, when I use netcat on my server to check that the magic packets get there, I can't see any output after sending the packets using gWakeOnLan. I tried both ports 9 and 40000.

I am using a router that was provided to me by my network provider, maybe I need to enable/unblock something there? No idea what it would be, though.

Any ideas on how to track this issue further down?

Edit: I am now using wol instead of gWakeOnLan. this command worked for me:

wol -p 9 -i 192.168.2.255 <server-mac-address>.

I got the IP from ip address :

inet 192.168.2.31/24 brd 192.168.2.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute eno1

I'd like having a little GUI but apparently it's not possible to configure the IP in gWakeOnLan like this. I tried setting it to 'internet' mode (to allow me to enter my IP) but that didn't work. Oh well, a little script to double-click is fine, too, haha