Magic Packets over LAN

[mario595]

I am trying to turn on my PC over the internet from my phone using WOL (wake on lan). Technically WOL is meant inside a network so technically I am trying to do a wake on wan. In my case the WAN happens to be the public internet. I've done some research into this and found that the following thread contains the best information in a single thread. It is 25+ pages but there is good information in there primarily by the members FORDEM and CRAZEEANGEL:

http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=191


I am in the boat of only being able to use WOL from the internet for a few minutes after turning the PC off. To make matters worse I have a netgear WNR3500 version 1 which:

A) doesn't support broadcast packet from the WAN
B) cannot issue the broadcast packet from the GUI (assuming it's opened up to remote access)
C) when I enable telnet on the router and log into it the only telnet commands you can issue are {cd exit export help login set}. This doesn't allow me to hardcode the PC's MAC to the ARP associations.
D) is not compatible with DD-WRT, Tomato, or open-WRT firmwares due to the Marvell controller (these firmwares have WOL capabilities from the WAN port)

All my options are dead ends but I think I have come up with a work around and want to share it with everybody before I try it. My network setup is a broadband cable modem 10Mb upload / 1Mb download going into the WNR3500 with a few wireless and wired devices hung off it. The wired devices have gigabit nics and cat6 cable.


Here's my idea:

I happen to have a Linksys 10/100 5-port network hub (not a switch) gathering dust in a closet somewhere. My PC has two onboard nics. One of them is currently disabled in the BIOS and Windows.

What if I run the cable modem output into the hub and then connect it to the router and second NIC on the PC I want to remote start. When a magic packet comes in from the internet my router will discard it (because the MAC address is no longer in its table) but the hub will ship it to the second card which would gobble it up and go. Since I only get 10Mb/1Mb bandith from my ISP, connecting the WAN port of the router to the hub doesn't hurt internet performance. My other wired devices can still talk to each other at 1GB/s speed.

Couldn't I activate my second NIC and set it up to accept WOL but ignore everything else? Maybe giving it only TCP/IP with a bogus IP address or gateway in TCP/IP properties? That would make it secure since it would be useless for anything except the magic packet which is what I want. My PC's performance wouldn't be adversely affected.

I want to get opinions in case I am missing something before I go looking for that thing.

[fordem]

First question - what ip address are you sending the magic packet to now (you say it works for a few minutes)

Second question - with the "new configuration", what ip address will you send the magic packet to?

And yes - the purpose of these questions is to get you to think - they do point you directly to the piece of the puzzle that youhaven't realised you need.

In that 25+ page megathread, there is a lot of information, and it actually does explain why your plan won't work.

[mario595]

That would be the ip address given to me by my ISP. Say it is 11.222.33.444. I can send a packet to this address from my phone using the MAC of my first NIC from the internet and it will start my PC but only if I just turned it off.

My router's ip is 192.168.1.1
My PC has a static IP of 192.168.1.100 and let say the MAC of the second NIC is 01:23:45:67:89:AB
I was hoping a magic packet sent to ip 11.222.33.444 with mac address 01:23:45:67:89:AB would be distributed to both the router and the second NIC by the hub. The packet to the router will do nothing (after the ARP association is gone) but the packet to the second nic would get the PC up.

I was assuming that if I had just a PC connected directly to the cable modem with no router/lan involved that a magic packet sent to my internet IP address (11.222.33.444) from http://wakeonlan.me/ would make it to my NIC. I'm getting the feeling that this is not correct.

[fordem]

Originally Posted by mario595

i'm getting the feeling that this is not correct.

exactly!!!