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Forum Discussion
WOL - Magic Packet
Hi, I'm having some issues getting WOL or Magic Packet to work on my RBR20. I have enabled Magic Packet on the Ethernet card of my PC and I've added a port forward on UDP port 7 and 9 on the Orbi. ...
Port Forwarding is a feature to allow devices on the internet to connect with specific devices on the Orbi LAN.
i.e. "if anyone out there on the internet sends a UDP packet to my public IP address, forward that packet to a specific IP address on the LAN."
That does not appear to be the goal here.
Perhaps it would be helpful to know what device/software is being used to send the magic packet to the PC.
My Windows PC has several options for Wake on LAN. Frankly, this is a rather esoteric topic. I would start with the WOL software documentation.
Installed two different Wake on LAN (WoL) apps on a generic Android tablet ($76 on Amazon):
- Fing - a multi-purpose networking application which includes WoL
- Wake on Lan - Mr. Webb
Tablet is connected to an Orbi RBR750 with WiFi. (To the primary WiFi network. Guest WiFi network cannot contact devices on the primary network - which includes Ethernet devices - so only the primary or IoT WiFi network can work for WoL.)
Enabled Wake on Magic Packet on Ethernet adapter of HP Windows 11 laptop. Ethernet adapter is connected to the same RBR750 router.
Both Android apps were able to "wake" laptop using the MAC address of the laptop. Thus, my conclusion is that using WiFi for the WoL connection has no impact on the process.
The original post did not specify which Orbi system is being used. My guess is that it "makes no difference". WoL works by sending a Level 2 broadcast packet containing the MAC address of the computer to "wake up". No ARP cache is required to send broadcast packets.