I use Wake-On-LAN quite a bit to boot my remote machines when I need access to do something on them or they have died after a prolonged power failure. OK, really I’m just too lazy to walk down to the basement an flip the power switch <rolleyes>.

One machine I have with an nVidia NIC in it was giving me fits. Sometimes a WOL packet would wake it up and other times it would just sit there daring me to get off my butt and press the power switch. Finally, after a bit of research I stumbled upon this article that describes setting up Wake-On-LAN in linux.  Now that I’ve configured the machine correctly, it taunts me no more.

Essentially, the nVidia NIC defaults to disabling WOL after every reboot.  You need to add an entry in your /etc/rc.local file to tell it to re-enable WOL or the next time you shut down, you won’t be able to remote start it.

# echo "/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g" >> /etc/rc.local