GAH! Computer techies... help please! (Wake-on-lan issues)

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 5:51 am

Yeah... so I just put together a "Torrent PC" out of an old Pentium II computer running at 300MHz with 32MB or RAM. The only thing I want it to do is download anime 24/7.

However, I would like to be able to completely control it from another computer. I already have it set up with VNC so I can control it once it boots, but I want to be able to actually boot it remotely. So, I've been experimenting with the WOL, and... well, failing. I've tried several programs and none of them have worked. I have an AL440LX motherboard with a CNet PRO200WL ethernet card, the 3-wire WOL cable is in place and my network card stays on when the computer is shut down. Last I checked, everything that seems like it should be enabled in my BIOS is. The activity light on my ethernet card even flashes when it receives a WOL signal from my other computer, so I know the MAC address is correct.

Does anyone else have any tips for me, by any chance?

Thanks.

Rain

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 10:46 am

You running Windows or or Linux distro, well likely a distro. So have you gone into the system settings and enabled that. Reason being you're talking about Waking the computer on LAN, that not really the same as boot on LAN. Wikipedia has an article about WOL and you seem to be missing an item or two to make it possible. I would suggest going with just making the system a headless server, enabling remote access (use ssh), and that's all.

So just configure the system as a server, boot it into (if Linux) runlevel 3, or a custom runlevel 4. Have it start the bittorrent as part of the login process and away you go. If you're unformiluar with remote login/access I'll tell you after setting the ssh on the remote machine up properly you can login and use "xterm" to get a gui for easy use.

Good luck.

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 3:19 pm

Ehh... well, I must say that I'm kind of ashamed. I'm using Windows 98SE...

But I did try Linux first. I tried DSL (D@mn Small Linux) since my hard drive is only 4GB. (Downloading to an networked drive.) I had that installed to my hard drive and working just great... but then when I tried to install VNC, things... didn't work out too well. I'm not very experienced with Linux, though I can follow simple (and complicated) instructions, for the most part. Anyway, I couldn't get that working, so I got fed up with it, formatted my hard drive and installed Windows 98SE, BitLord and VNC and it works great... 'cept for that whole WOL thing.

I will learn Linux... I must. It is my duty as a PC geek to learn how to use Linux... just... not all at once.

Thanks a lot for your help. I'll look at that Wiki article and report back.

Post by **gannon** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 4:14 pm

If you want it to be a 100% torrent machine, I'd recommend Ubuntu Server, bittorrent, sshd, vsftpd, apache, and samba. That way you can ssh into the machine, use wget or lynx to grab a torrent file (or just load one from another pc/storage device), and download to a folder where you can then access/manage the files through http, ftp, and a windows share folder

Oh yeah, and the whole only download legal things spiel

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 4:24 pm

Nope, still nothing. I've taken snapshots of my BIOS. Do you see anything wrong with my settings? I have the lastest BIOS flashed in, btw.

Post by **gannon** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 4:27 pm

I don't see any WoL support in them. Looks like it'll let you network boot though, but that's for things like a terminal server.

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 6:06 pm

gannon wrote:I don't see any WoL support in them. Looks like it'll let you network boot though, but that's for things like a terminal server.

I don't know why the BIOS don't just call it WOL, but these two settings lead me to believe it does support it and it's enabled.

Post by **gannon** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 6:16 pm

Ah, didn't notice that (was looking lower down the bios page there).
Well, if you have a machine with php or perl on it in your network you can try manually waking it with a script.
like in php:

Code: Select all

<?php
function WakeOnLan($mac, $network='255.255.255.255') {
	for($i=0;$i<6;$i++) $packet .= chr(255);
	$mac_byte = explode(':', $mac);
	for($i=0;$i<6;$i++) $mac_addr .= chr(hexdec($mac_byte[$i]));
	for($i=0;$i<16;$i++) $packet .= $mac_addr;
	$sock = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, SOL_UDP);
	socket_set_option($sock, SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, TRUE);
	socket_sendto($sock, $packet, strlen($packet), 0, $network, 9);
	socket_close($sock);
	return;
}
WakeOnLan('00:30:1B:38:6F:0C'); //replace with the target machine's MAC, defaults to the 255.255.255.255 network address.
?>

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 6:43 pm

your motherboard doesn't have an integrated network card or anything, right? it seems like it should be working, its really not that complicated a process.

did you check the user manual for the motherboard?

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 8:28 pm

No integrated networking, and I don't have the manual. What confuses me is that I know my network card is recieving the magic packet because the activity light flashes when it does, yet it still doesn't boot. I heard that it won't work if your PSU can't put out 720mA @ 5V on the standby circuit... or something like that... might this be the problem? I don't think I have another PSU to test it with. Eh, I don't know what to do next... I'm very confused...

siegeshot · Post by **siegeshot** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 8:54 pm

Do you think it'd only work with an onboard NIC?

If your compy is on a network the blinky goes off all the time it seems like.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 8:55 pm

You got the system setup the way they mention in the wikipedia article?

If you don't or can't just go with what Gannon suggested earlier, setup an Ubunutu server, and connect to it over the LAN via ssh.

And for the love of god add some ram and a bigger hard drive. 80GB hard drive wasn't enough for me when I was using my Gateway for nothing but torrents.

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Thu Dec 14, 2006 4:57 pm

If I could afford to add more ram or a bigger hard drive, do you think I'd be using a Pentium II anyway?

I download to a separate 80GB hard drive on a different computer, which is inconvenient since I don't plan to leave that computer on 24/7, but it's all I have to work with for now. 'Sides, I usually download anime in ~4.5GB torrents, so I burn them to DVD shortly afterwards.

I don't know what I'm gonna do about this whole WOL thing... but at the moment I have enough anime to hold me over for quite a while before I have to start downloading more. I'm going to try starting my other computer up (which has built-in ethernet and I think WOL capabilities) via WOL later to make sure it's not something stupid that I'm doing and that it is in fact just my Torrent PC being fussy. Now, I'm gonna get back to watching Naruto... I kinda just started watching it (currently on episode 17), so I've got to catch up.

Meh · Post by **Meh** » Thu Dec 14, 2006 5:24 pm

Stupid question:

Why not turn it on by hand?

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Thu Dec 14, 2006 6:01 pm

Meh wrote:Stupid question:

Why not turn it on by hand?

How dare you suggest such a good idea!!!!