WOL over internet

[Sigma365]

Hi all, hope someone out there can help me.

I'm trying to use WOL On app on my Android phone to wake my PC remotely, it used to work but recently has stopped without anything being different or any settings altered.

I have Nord VPN on my phone, but I have WolOn tunnelled, and have tried with Nord uninstalled.

My PC has a static address on my network, assigned by my router (Vodafone connect-Huawei963168_HUAWEIVOX25)

I have forwarded UDP traffic on port 7 to the PCs internal IP address.

Using WOL over LAN works, running Wireshark on the PC shows ICMP packets coming through.

When I try over WAN, only ECHO packets are registered.. i cant find a setting to drop external packets that i can turn off.

I have reset and factory reset my router, I have installed a different WOL app, I have installed and tried WOL apps on a different phone and used depicus.com to send the magic packet.

If I probe port 9, it shows as closed.

I have also tried port 7 and various others.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

[dingdongdang]

WOL doesn't use IP addresses, so port forwarding to your computer's IP address won't work. You need to (re-)broadcast the WOL magic packet on your LAN.

You might get it to work with a static ARP table entry consisting of an unused IP address on your PC's subnet and a MAC address of FFFFFFFFFFFF. That is probably achievable by setting a fixed IP address in your router's DHCP server settings. You then port forward to that unused IP address. The  MAC address causes your wake up package to be broadcast on the entire LAN and your PC wakes up.

[Sigma365]

Thanks ill try that later this week.

Cant understand why it all of a sudden stopped working though. I've got my network set up same as it always was.

Maddening.

I shall let you know how I get on.

[mk5912]

I'm a little late to the party so I understand if you don't remember, but did you manage to find a solution to this?

I have a similar issue with WOL On and port forwarding, I have tried using the broadcast IP and MAC address but both seem to be blocked by the router. 

[Sigma365]

Hi,

Sorry, I can't help you with this. I never got mine working and gave up on it. I tried so many configurations as well. I've got a different phone, router and PC now, maybe I'll give it another try.  I seem to remember when I did have it working, there was something that had to be set in the app that didnt make sense though. If I figure it out, I'll let you know.

[dingdongdang]

Probably easier to do this over a VPN, but I do actually have it working with pfSense as my router (and my PC living in the 10.0.0.0/24 subnet):

1. Set pfSense as DMZ device on the vodafone hub.
2. In the DHCP server settings on pfsense create a static entry for the mac address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff and IP address 10.0.0.254 (just pick any unused IP address within your LAN subnet). Important: make sure you tick the "ARP table static entry" box. 
3. Port forward udp port 66789 (a random unused port) from your WAN interface to port 9 on 10.0.0.254
4. WoL works by sending a magic packet to port 66789 on your vodafone IP with the actual MAC address of your PC.

Obviously this is all quite specific to my setup, but it might help you figure something out. HTH

[Cynric]

@mk5912  You could do this by adding a Raspberry Pi to your network and make that a WOL Server. You can then setup a SSL tunnel and remote to the Pi to issue your WOL instructions. There are a number of sites with instructions, just use your favourite search engine.