My first post - Can someone help me understand the WOL feature on a RN102 NAS? I just received the NAS and got it setup yesterday.
I expected the NAS to go into some low power mode overnight and that when a LAN computer powers up, the NAS's WOL feature wakes up the NAS when a computer attempts to talk to the NAS.
I enabled the WOL in the NAS configuration. I don't see a setting for inactivity timer, so I presumed there must be a hardcoded timer value built in. The Software Manual does not provide any insight, only how to enable or disable WOL. Does WOL work with the scheduled shutdown? If I configure a shutdown schedule and put the NAS to sleep overnight can WOL over ride the shutdown schedule?
This morning the NAS appeared to be fully alive (Power, Act, and Drive LEDs were On). Not what I expected. The only LAN devices powered overnight are the NAS and Router.
WOL indeed allows another device to turn the NAS on if it is turned off - either if manually powered down, or scheduled shutdown.
However, WOL only kicks in when the other device (a PC in your case) sends the NAS a "magic packet". Normal LAN activity won't do it. There are some freeware packages you can download which will send them.
Of course you also need to wait for the NAS to turn on/boot up before you can access it - which does take a while.
I will give that a try. I was afraid to try a scheduled shutdown thinking the NAS would be in a coma and not able to wake up. I use Linux, so I don't expect to have problems finding a Magic Packet sending tool.
Obviously, I am still learning. I just figured out how to access Home shares via Linux, that had me going for a while, but all is good there now.
The mount command is powerful and can actually be pretty useful in a countless number of situations. I know a thing or two about linux, so if you have trouble we may take a look at it. I may be able to save you some time.(depending on your level) For example, I don't know how you plan to backup your machine, but with a little script that uses mount and rsync commands you can actually backup your home folder to the NAS easily.
Thanks xeltros, I was not planning to use Rsync from Linux, but I am open. I have been using DirSyncPro application (www.dirsyncpro.org) to replicate important files to three Linux computers. From Linux that tool requires SSHFS to connect to others via the LAN. Now having a NAS I need to think about my options for backups. I really like DirSyncPro, if enabling SSH on the NAS permits using that tool it is my initial thought.
FYI - I did configure scheduled shutdown and that worked, the NAS was asleep when I checked this morning; that makes me feel better about saving power.
SSH is not something that is highly advised. Netgear says that they can deny support for devices having SSH enabled. That said last time I called support they enabled it on my box. There is a post here that states that as long as you don't do something stupid you are good to go, but I guess this would also depend on the tech you get on the other end of the line. viewtopic.php?p=111042#p111042
Rsync method doesn't require SSH but this is a one-way method. You copy from something to something. Rsync spots the differences and only copies necessary files. It would be triggered via a cron job with a timer of your choosing, not when a file is modified.
I was able to send the magic packet to the NAS when it was asleep and the NAS woke up as expected. So, that works great from devices on my LAN. Thanks for the help.
If anyone cares I electd to install the "wakeonlan" package from the Linux Mint repository, that works well and does not need elevated permissions to execute.
Related question: Is it possible to send such a packet via Internet to wake the NAS while away from home?
Related question: Is it possible to send such a packet via Internet to wake the NAS while away from home?
It is a broadcast packet, so it cannot be (and your NAT router would block it if it receives it).
There are add-ons for the older NAS which will send WoL on your local LAN from the NAS. That does work remotely, because you are use http to tell the NAS to send them. I don't think they exist on OS6 yet though.
Those add-ons are more useful to me than WoL support in the NAS itself, since I am more interested in waking up client machines, and leave my NAS on 24-7.
I've often wished Netgear routers had an advanced feature to send WoL packets from their admin GUI.
That is what I expected. It would be nice to go away for a week or two with the NAS powered down and be able to wake it up while on the road if I needed it.
Generally this trick is to direct the magic packet to a static/reserved IP address instead of broadcasting it. But since the device is asleep or off, it won't respond to ARP requests - so the packet might not be reliably forwarded to the device (I don't think the guide says this though). It depends on the device being in the router's ARP cache.
If you can install a udp proxy on your LAN (somewhere that is always on) you could use that to broadcast, but that is getting complicated and fragile - especially if you want it to work after a power failure.
Anyway, the OS4 add-on works for me, all you need to do is create suitable browser bookmarks for each device. Direct router support through https would be a nice feature.
Having a similar add-on for OS6 would also be nice, especially if you could also send WoL packets on a schedule.
