Update: See article here
They just don’t seem to work. I’ve spent an annoying hour or so trying to get WOL to work with an HP Microserver – no joy whatsoever. I assumed it must be my code until I tried it on a few other machines but they worked just fine.
Now most of my machines are Realtek whereas HP are using Broadcom (as do the Dells). I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Broadcom, but whenever I have a weird network problem they have a habit of being at the heart of it. Is it my magic packet? As far as I know it’s supposed to be 48-bits of ‘1’ followed by sixteen copies of the MAC address. Does it need a secure-on password? If so, how come you can’t set one in the BIOS.
I’ve asked an HP server expert: “Update the BIOS”. Perhaps, but these are brand new machines of an established design. They either turn on when they receive the packet, or they don’t work, and I can’t believe HP didn’t test them. Then again…
I’m told that these do support WOL on Windows, but not if you’re running anything else. On the face of it this is bonkers. Why should the OS the powered-off drive affect anything. The machine is off; the OS isn’t running. Well here’s a theory – before Windows shuts off it puts something in a register on the Broadcom chip to leave it in a WOL state. With the wrong drivers this doesn’t happen. Setting it in the BIOS doesn’t help, because it’s erased by the OS driver. The BIOS doesn’t restore it as the power is killed, but Windows hits the registers differently.
Unfortunately Broadcom doesn’t seem keen on releasing the documentation needed to write proper drivers to anyone other than Microsoft. Is this my imagination? Everyone else publishes the reference material, but Broadcom – I can’t find it.
If anyone can throw light on this one, please do. I’m still looking.
Update
Fitting a Realtek-based NIC in the Microserver and using that instead solves the problem. WOL just works. If you’re going to order one, remember it’s PCIe, not PCI, and that you really need one with a low-profile bracket option because a full-height card won’t fit.
Further Update: See article here