Introduction to Wake On Lan

Wake-on-lan (also known with the “W.O.L” acronym) is a standard ethernet feature which allows a machine to be woken up on the reception of a specific type of network packet (the so called MagicPacket). The main advantage of this feature is that it allows us to keep a machine in a low power consumption state, and be accessed only when needed. In this tutorial we see how to enable the WOL feature on our ethernet card under Linux, and how to send the network packet needed to wake up a machine.