I am trying to set up my homelab to boot whenever it is being accessed. I set up wake on LAN for unicast, and it works fine for a while after shutting down the system. It stops working after a few hours of the server being turned off, though.

From what I’m gathering online, the issue is that my router uses an ARP cache. Before that gets flushed, it still works. However, it seems like my router does not allow me to configure a static ARP entry (using a ISP provided router). I already set a static IP for my server in the router, but it still won’t work a few hours.

Is there any way to make this work? I just want to allow a friend of mine to boot my server whenever they try to access a service on it.

  • silly goose meekah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    33·
    7 days ago

    Do you think I didn’t read this? You obviously saw that I posted it in another comment, and I am mentioning info from the very text you posted here.

    (Edit: I am realizing I am coming across as kinda hostile here, but I genuinely just want to understand your thought process behind posting this)

    If you read the comments of the answer you copied, the OP of the question also said the following:

    The following solutions worked: Static ARP entries and subnet-directed broadcasts. You may use one of both if you have the same scenario. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

    Them mentioning that one ‘may use one of both’ makes me believe there is a way to make this work properly with unicast. The serverfault post is also mentioning the need to manage several machines this way, which is why I believe the answer you copied suggested using broadcast, as managing ARP entries for several machines could become tedious and unreliable.