Re: Wake on LAN in the enterprise

[Joel Jaeggli <joelja () bogus com>]

On 12/13/10 8:32 AM, Jack Bates wrote:
> On 12/13/2010 10:20 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> > WOL is unfortunately terribly deficient in that the spec. never
> > envisioned the possibility
> > of a need for wake on WAN.
> >
> > Bottom line, it's a non-routeable layer 2 protocol. Your choices boil
> > down to the
> > helper address nightmare you describe or proxy servers on every subnet.
>
> I would suspect that proxy servers being the better deal, though my
> experience with Cisco is that you may have to use ASR type gear to get a
> nicer layout (similar to service providers) where you can backend
> everything to a radius server (I'm still waiting to test this myself,
> but IOS is really weak on DHCP support).

assuming you don't mind burning an ip address per subnet you can do this
with a static arp entry for an ethernet multicast address even if your
l3 platform doesn't allow subnet directed  multicast.

on a firewall platform basied on linux I specifically worked around the
deliberate lack of subnet directed broadcast by natting from the
broadcast address of the target subnet to an rfc 1918 address on the
subnet with a static arp entry pointing at a multicast address. it
worked fine, exploited the fact that rewrite occurs before forwarding on
linux and allowed the use of a pre-existing management tool that used
subnet directed broadcasts.

> Jack