NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Wake on LAN Forward to Broadcast Address using port forward or static route
I have a R7900P Nergear router and I am trying to enable wake on LAN for a computer on the network.
WOL works for a while after the computer turns off, but eventually the router "forgets" the computer and will no longer port forward the WOL packet. In order to fix this issue I tried to setup the router to broadcast the packet by either port forwarding to the broadcast address or set up a static route to achieve this. When I try to do either of these it says that the IP is not valid and doesn't allow me to do it. Is there a way to get around this so WOL will work?
Network config:
IP address:192.168.1.1
IP Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
For the port forward I try to add the internal IP address as 192.168.1.255 but it won't let me.
For the static route I tried to add:
Destination IP Address: 192.168.1.254
IP Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.255
Gateway IP Address: 192.168.1.255
Metric: 2
This also gave an error and wouldn't allow me to save.
1 Reply
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- You can't forward the 192.168.1.255 address since it's the Broadcast address of the subnet.
I'm not sure why you're messing with IPs since 1) when a PC is powered off and only listening to PCIe wakeup events, it does not have an IP address and 2) WoL works with MAC addresses and not IP addresses.
