Enabling Wake On Lan on Fedora 16

April 18, 2012: Update - Many users are asking on various forums about WOL on Fedora 16.  My current Operating System is now Fedora 16 and the instructions below are perfectly functional.

Here are simple instructions to setup Wake On Lan on Fedora 14 and above or other versions of linux in general.

Wake-on-lan is a useful tool, but there are tricks to getting it to work correctly under Fedora. Enabling wake-on-lan manually on the network card does not suffice to allow my computer to be awaken remotely. (Lazy computer).

First check the current settings:

# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
    ...
    Supports Wake-on: g
    Wake-on: d
    ...

'd' means wake-on-lan is currently disabled.

I can enable it manually by running the following command:

# ethtool -s eth0 wol g

Unfortunately a snag occurs during the shutdown process; wake-on-lan is disabled automatically.

In order to keep it active after shutdown I must create and use the following script: /etc/init.d/wol.sh

#!/bin/sh
# chkconfig: 0123456 55 10
ethtool -s eth0 wol g

Add execute permission to the file

# chmod +x /etc/init.d/wol.sh

Finally, add the script to my services configuration:

# chkconfig --add /etc/init.d/wol.sh

This allows wake-on-lan to remain active during the shutdown process.

NOTE: Verify the chkconfig priority settings as well as the runlevels that the script runs under as they may be slightly incorrect.

I would very much like to know if anyone can provide improvements to this solution, or even an alternate solution.