Wake On Lan (waking up your NAS)

It would be wonderful if the official firmware would have a function to wake up any network device (using mac address).

I tried wake on lan with the custom firmware by adding a single command to the startup script which sends a magic packet to the given mac address (broadcast in the current subnet). This worked fine for me, except that the command is only executed when powering on the wdtv (reactivating from standby does not).

So it would be nice if you could use wake on lan in two ways:

  • automatic wake on lan when turning on the wdtv (also from standby)
  • manual wake on lan using the wdtv menu (disabling the automatic wake on lan)

Of course the manual wake on lan “button” could still be available when using the automatic mode.

I guess that many users have a NAS. Many NAS systems (like Synology, QNAP and others) go into standby by spinning down the HDD(s), but the system is still running, so there’s no need for wake on lan since the NAS is always visible in your LAN and spins up the HDD(s) as soon as a network share is accessed.

But many users have either just a normal PC with shares or something like a Windows Homer Server. Those systems have a pretty high power consumption in comparison to ARM-based-embedded-linux NAS-systems. So it is obvious that you use standby. But in this case the system is completely down (not only the HDD(s))…only way to wake up is pressing the power button oder sending a magic packet.

It would be great if you could just consider adding this feature in a future firmware release. Thanks

btw: just found the ideas lab and posted my idea there, too.

I tried to push this issue as well. This feature is essential and need to be implemented. Don’t know if WD takes it serious!?

SInce the type of device you mention takes a fairly long time to come up and require a password, I don’t think it is very useful. Thus I for one, do not want WD to spend time doing this when other features are so much more useful…  Al

Don’t hold your breath.  That functionality is SO esoteric (maybe 0.1% of all users would care), I doubt that’d even get attention.

As clunky as the UI is, anyway, I could walk to my NAS and poke it in the eye just as fast as navigating menus to do that…

:wink: