Porteus Kiosk

 

Wake On LAN in Porteus Kiosk


Since version 3.2 Porteus Kiosk allows waking the kiosk machines remotely through the Wake On Lan feature. All kiosks can be powered up from one place in your office. Please remember that WOL works for PCs physically connected through an ethernet cable and it doesn't work for wireless connections.

WOL strictly depends on the hardware capabilities so before enabling this option in the kiosk wizard please make sure that your motherboard supports it. The BIOS of the kiosk machine might need to be reconfigured in order to allow Wake On LAN, please enter it and search for an option named 'PCI Power up', 'Wake on PCI', 'PME Event Wake up', 'Allow PCI wake up event' or similar then enable this function.

To ensure that drivers for the NIC card support wake on lan, please login to kiosk through SSH and run following command:

    ethtool eth0 | grep Wake-on

you should see something like:

    Supports Wake-on: pumbag

    Wake-on: b

If the 'g' letter is present then the NIC supports receiving of the 'magic packets' and can wake the PC on a remote request.

Many drivers have the Wake-on-LAN function switched off by default. In the example above, the default wake-on-Lan activity is set to 'b' (broadcast) and we need to change it to 'g' (magic packet). Here is where the Kiosk Wizard comes in handy as all what you need to do is to activate the WOL option during the kiosk configuration stage and the system will look after the rest.

For waking up the kiosks over the network you need to know the MAC address of the target PC. You can issue the following command on the kiosk side which shows the required MAC address:

    ifconfig eth0 | grep HWaddr

Finally - you need to use a special tool to send the 'magic packet' to the client. Under Linux it can be done with the help of the 'wakeonlan' utility. The kiosk's MAC address is used as an argument to the command:

    wakeonlan 01:23:44:55:66:77

To wake up the kiosks from Windows you may use programs like FUSION WakeUp on LAN or WOL - Magic Packet Sender. Mac OSx users could use for example WakeOnLan utility.

Document created with the help of the Gentoo and Arch wiki.