WOL Not working on older machines...

[_techie_]

Hi,

 

We have some older (5 years) Dell optiplex 170L's, and some older Stone Computer Workstations, that are refusing to WOL.

 

We have checked the BIOS settings, and they are correct. We have reset the BIOS, and changed the battery, and matched the settings against a working machine. On the Stone machines, we have even tried a BIOS upgrade, which doesn't work consistently...

 

We have checked and triple checked the MAC Address on the clients, and even used a WOL packet sniffer to make sure the machine(s) are receiving it (which they are). We have tried new network cables/patch leads, and even tried switching the wall socket to the working machine next to it and it still fails.

 

Is it down to the motherboard/network socket being tired/worn out through use? If so, I might have to resort to using the BIOS wake up instead

 

We also do not have any VLANS setup (as yet) and I have checked the port configuration on the switch, which appears fine. I even turned off spanning tree protocol as a guess, but no luck

 

Any ideas?

[mullet_man]

You also need to ensure that in the power management tab in windows is set to allow the computer to wake the machine!

 

Also in the advanced settings of the nic in windows might have some settings that relate to WOL, I had this just last week with some old Stone machines!

 

I also had to update the NIC drivers on some older pcs to ensure the manufacture drivers were installed to bring up the advanced settings, as the ones installed by Windows didn't have settings about WOL

 

But that's were the solution lies no doubt.

 

Hope thos makes sense, am typing it on my phone and only just got up!

[_techie_]

Cheers dood!

 

That might be worth a look, but I didn't think Windows got involved in the process (it was purely BIOS?) that WOL requires?

 

Thanks all the same, will investigate later. Will check back in later.

 

Regards,

[mullet_man]

Yep I thought that too, what drivers are they?

 

Ours were Realtek 8193 iirc!

[_techie_]

Just checked our working machines, and the driver is set to be OS controlled! I didn't realise this! Deployed some software last night, and it is just running when I came in this morning, on the machines that didn't come on. Ours are intel pro 100 VE onboard NIC's.

 

Thanks so far.

[mullet_man]

Attached a jpeg of where you need to get to

 

Goto Properties of the NIC, click Configure, and then the Advanced tab.

 

On the older Stone machines, they had some settings relating to the WOL, the attachement is my Lenovo machine.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Stevo.

[_techie_]

Got it working, it seems the culprit seems to be the PRO 100 VE Workstations. All others seem to be working ATM. Thanks, didnt realise Windows controlled the hardware.

 

Thanks

Mark