Arch Linux

moniker117

Member

Registered: 2010-06-18

Posts: 7

Wake on lan using Artigo A1000

Hello everyone,

I have an VIA Artigo computer.  I loaded Arch Linux on it and I wanted to use wake on lan.  I followed the instructions on the wiki page for wake on lan, but it would not work correctly when I tried to wake the computer using wol.  It would only work if I had hibernated the computer using the pm-hibernate command.  If I tried to wake it after turning the computer off by either using the halt command or shutdown command it would not respond to the magic packets.  I tried doing some searches for this problem but I couldn't find anyone using Arch Linux with a similar problem.  I broadened the search and found that others had experienced this problem in other distributions using similar hardware.  According to them, the problem was that when the computer was being shutdown it was taking network offline, which would prevent the system from recognizing the magic packet being sent.  Their advice was to prevent the OS from doing that at shutdown.  Unfortunately, their specific solutions didn't seem to apply to Arch Linux, I'm not sure if it has to do with their distros using sysv scripts vs Arch Linux's BSD style scripts or if it was my cluelessness.  I was able to get it to work by editing the /etc/rc.d/network file and commenting out the line that reads /sbin/ifconfig ${1} down >/dev/null 2>&1 in the ifdown() function.  Doing that has resolved my wake on lan problem, now the system will respond to magic packets sent using the wol command after I have shut it down using the shutdown command.  My gut feeling tells me that it might not be the best way to fix this problem, I'm concerned that I might update a package some time in the future and this configuration file may get wiped out.  Is that a valid concern?  Is there perhaps a better way of fixing this problem? 

Please let me know.

Thanks!