Wake on LAN from WAN possible for my setup?

NewAccount

Honorable
Oct 26, 2013
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10,510
Here is my hardware and setup.

MB Asrock Z77 Extreme4

Router is Netgear WNDR3400 running DD-WRT v24-sp2 (03/25/13) mini
(SVN revision 21061). The router is running in client mode.

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate.

I'm using a Nexus 7 (android 5.1) and the following apps:
Unified Remote
WoL Wake on Lan Wan

I have no trouble getting the computer to wake when my phone is connected via the same client router's WIFI connection but not when using my data connection.

I've read that the computer has to be connected to an ethernet connection to be able to WOL from a WAN and I'm not sure if my system fits that criteria.

Can someone help me out here? If I can't get it to work with this setup that's fine and I can save myself a lot of headache by just accepting it.

Please help me out and let me know if I need to post further information to help solve this.

Thank you.
 
Solution
Very technically there is not such things as wake on "WAN". There are bunch of hacks to make this work. Even worse microsoft has gotten involved and implemented their own special versions of wake on lan that make choosing which hack to use even worse.

A wake on lan packet is a special broadcast packet set to all port in the lan that contains the mac address of the device to woken in a special pattern.

The problem is broadcast packets are not allowed to pass between even vlans much less wan-lan.

So the most common hack used that is not OS dependent is

..............

First is to find the port that the app is using. Very technically there is not a port but you commonly see UDP port 9

Then you map this port to a unused ip...
Very technically there is not such things as wake on "WAN". There are bunch of hacks to make this work. Even worse microsoft has gotten involved and implemented their own special versions of wake on lan that make choosing which hack to use even worse.

A wake on lan packet is a special broadcast packet set to all port in the lan that contains the mac address of the device to woken in a special pattern.

The problem is broadcast packets are not allowed to pass between even vlans much less wan-lan.

So the most common hack used that is not OS dependent is

..............

First is to find the port that the app is using. Very technically there is not a port but you commonly see UDP port 9

Then you map this port to a unused ip address in your router lan say 192.168.1.250. Then the part that is not often supported by routers. You need to put in a static ARP entry mapping 192.168.1.250 to the broadcast mac address FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF

So now what happens is you put the WAN ip of your router in your APP. It send the packet to the router which translates into a broadcast packet.

.......................

This mostly works because the end device ignores the fact that the packet contains a IP header even though it should care.

Now it would be nice to just send traffic to the broadcast ip of 192.168.1.255 but because this was of the common early denial of service attacks router do not allow you to do that from a external network. What the above hack does is reopen that hole. Anyone that would send traffic to udp port 9 will spam every machine in your network with that data not just the WoL machine. A small amount will cause no issue but if someone were to send huge amounts all your machines would be affected.

The main issue to doing most these things is the routers most times do not support these options....to prevent dumb people from killing themselves. If your netgear supports it you might load dd-wrt

 
Solution

NewAccount

Honorable
Oct 26, 2013
5
0
10,510
bill001g,

Thanks for taking the time to give me a detailed solution to my problem.

I wanted to attempt the fix before I commented but WOL issues are falling to the back burner right now.

Thanks again!