Re: Wake on LAN support. NetworkManager?

[Holger Macht <holger homac de>]

On Wed 27. Jun - 11:57:28, Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
>  Holger Macht wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I'm currently looking for a place to integrate Wake On LAN
> > capabilities/enablement. As a logical result, NetworkManager came to my
> > mind.
> > When talking about Wake On LAN, I'm talking about the functionality
> > ethtool provides, and about the network drivers which implement ethtool
> > support. I've already created a proof-of-concept patch. The current work
> > is based on NetworkManager-0.6.5, just because it's the most recent stable
> > release.
> > I've added three new D-Bus methods:
> >   getWakeOnLanEnabled
> >   getWakeOnLanSupported
> >   setWakeOnLanEnabled
> > So this mail is not a "please commit", but rather a question if it makes
> > sense to integrate into NetworkManager at all. The other possibility would
> > be to add to HAL if it doesn't fit into the NetworkManager concept.
> > Comments?
> >   - Holger
> 
>  I won't comment on the patch itself (I haven't looked it over yet here) but 
>  I am wondering exactly what you mean - assuming the laptop is asleep/off NM 
>  won't be running/active to catch the WOL signal - or is this supposed to 
>  send it to another machine?   I admit I am not familiar with the ethtool and 
>  what it does wrt WOL (and only have 1 machine that support WOL afaik) but I 
>  would think this is something that would be more suited for hal, or a 
>  persons bios (in fact, as far as I knew, it has to be enabled in bios - but 
>  I know I am not the most knowledgeable person, and I am always willing to 
>  learn!)
> 

Wake On LAN has to be enabled in the BIOS for all this to work anyway,
right. But you still have to enable it from software, because it is
disabled by default with most cards AFAIC. The actual handling of the WOL
signal, and the waking up is still handled by the hardware itself.

What the methods do are actually just frontending ethtool. They just
enabling WOL on the network card. Another system has to send the so called
MagicPacket to wake up the system afterwards.

  getWakeOnLanEnabled   --> ethtool eth0 | grep "Wake-on"
  getWakeOnLanSupported --> ethtool eth0 | grep "Supports Wake-on"
  setWakeOnLanEnabled   --> ethtool -s eth0 wol umbg


Right, this doesn't entirely has something to do with "managing networks",
it's just something that has to be done with each network interface the
system has.

Hopes this makes things more clear.

 - Holger