Tuesday, 24 April 2001
Alisdair and Vic got me a 3Com WOL NIC for my birthday a month back but I never managed to get the WOL part working. Well, I got it working once, but I had used windows and shutdown from there, but I don't generally use windows so that was a bit useless.
Anyway, one of the problems I had was that linux seemed to put the machine into a hard shutdown, that is the WOL card got no power when the puter was turned off, but it needed to be in soft power off. So, I bought my mouse and discovered that when I shut down the light didn't go off in the mouse, so I figured it was in soft power off, which it was. I've no idea why it goes into soft power off now when it didn't before, but I aint complaining! "So..." thinks I, "why don't I try to get WOL working again?". So I did, I spent ages trying to compile alternate drivers for the NIC (a 3Com 905CX) to get it working, but none of them would compile under 2.4.2. So, I finally upgraded to 2.4.3 cos I spotted a little update to the driver in the changelog, I then read thru the changelog for the driver only to find that to use WOL I had to insert the module with enable_wol=1. I stuck that in and now it works!
It only took me 9 months since my first thoughts on the subject to getting it working... Not long... Honest... ;)
Word of the day: persistence