Coding with Titans

Some time ago I have written a post about, how to setup Windows 10 to wake it up remotely via network using magic packet. The question that remained unanswered is: how to actually send this packet to the PC to trigger it running.

In the first example I will use Raspberry Pi with Rasbpian Stretch Lite installed:

1. First make sure a tool etherwake is available. If not, this could be fixed with following command, otherwise skip this step:

sudo apt-get install etherwake

2. Then simply invoke it with proper arguments:

sudo etherwake –i <ethernet-interface-name> <PC MAC-address>

Some explanations:

Yes, it will ask you for a password, each time you try to call it. Also MAC address should be specified in format “XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX”. That was the easier part.

The harder part is that etherwake by default tries to use eth0 as the network interface, where to send the magic packet. Raspberry has a feature called “Predictable network interface names” enabled by default (since August 2017 I think; was even in Jessie edition, but was disabled by default). With a big probability the name of the interface will be different than eth0 (something like enx?? or wlx?? depending if using LAN or WiFi and ?? should be replaced with Raspberry’s own MAC address).

To list existing network interfaces type this command:

ip link show

Then grab the proper name, which is not a loopback. Or use raspi-config (via command “sudo raspi-config”) and navigate to “2: Network Options” and disable predictable network interface names, so it should go back to using eth0 and wlan0 names.

In the second example I wish to show, how to achieve the same effect on Synology NAS station.

If your DSM is really old, you could use the optional package manager named ipkg. Though this manager make sure wakelan utility is installed. And waking up a PC is just a matter of issuing following command in the console:

export PATH=$PATH:/volume1/@optware/bin/

wakelan –m <PC MAC-address>

MAC this time is in format: “XXYYZZXXYYZZ”.

On the other hand, if you don’t want to play with custom package managers and have a decent DSM 6.x on-board, one could use the build-in synonet utility (as also described here). Then it’s just a matter of calling it this way:

sudo synonet --wake XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX eth0

Executable is located at: /usr/syno/sbin/synonet

And that’s all. Have fun!