Using Wake On Lan Over Internet Without Broadcast Address

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BallistiX09

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Dec 5, 2013
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I've been trying to set up WOL on my PC for a while now, and it works no problem when I'm on the same network, but when I'm away from home, or not connected to the network (mobile data for example), it doesn't work at all.

I've been looking into it and it looks the router I have (Sky Fibre v2) doesn't support sending the magic packet over the broadcast address, so the packet never actually gets to my computer. I may have the wording of that wrong but hopefully you'll get what I mean. I also can't change the router because it's against Sky's T&Cs to replace their router with another.

Does anybody here with a bit more knowledge about this have any other idea about how I can get this to work?

Thanks!
 
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It appears you have read how this actually works and the data being sent to the broadcast address is pretty much required. This feature has been removed from almost every router because of how trivial it is to do DoS attacks against every machine in your network simultaneously. You pretty much must be on the same lan to send to the broadcast

Now very technically the PC should not accept a IP header in the packet but the actual rules are a little vague other than the packet must contain the magic mac string. Many machines will also accept packets set to the actual mac rather than the broadcast but not all.

You only hope is to get another router and place in behind the one you are not allowed to mess with. Hopefully you are...
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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It appears you have read how this actually works and the data being sent to the broadcast address is pretty much required. This feature has been removed from almost every router because of how trivial it is to do DoS attacks against every machine in your network simultaneously. You pretty much must be on the same lan to send to the broadcast

Now very technically the PC should not accept a IP header in the packet but the actual rules are a little vague other than the packet must contain the magic mac string. Many machines will also accept packets set to the actual mac rather than the broadcast but not all.

You only hope is to get another router and place in behind the one you are not allowed to mess with. Hopefully you are allowed to set your second router as a DMZ or at least port forward.

You could buy a asus router that has a remote memu option that will cause the router to send the packet. Otherwise you are going to need a router you can set static arp entries in (likely third party firmware will be required). So what you do is map some unused IP to the broadcast mac FFFFFF:FFFFFF. You then port forward to that unused IP address. Anything you send to the port will be broadcast to all machines on the network.
 
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BallistiX09

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Dec 5, 2013
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Ahhh right, I was hoping there would be a way around it without getting another router, but if it works, that's just what I'll have to do! I'll give it a go, I can set the DMZ IP on my current router so that should work... Here's hoping! I'll see if I can find a router which supports OpenWRT, that seems to be pretty useful when it comes to things like this. Thanks for the help!
 
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BallistiX09

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Yeah, I've tried that already but sadly it only works when on the same network, as soon as I leave the network it stops working :( Thanks though!
 
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Unknown_Linux

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May 25, 2016
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Yea my router is running DDWRT and i use wake on lan all the time.

I ended up having to enable WAN access to my router page and setting a complex password so no one else could easily get into it . Then whenever i needed to turn on my computer to access it through rdp while away from home all i had to do was have my router tell my computer to wake up. Since DDWRT has this option built in its quite useful at times
 
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