Wake on LAN in the enterprise

Mon Dec 13 16:20:20 UTC 2010

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.

Owen

On Dec 13, 2010, at 8:08 AM, Berry Mobley wrote:

> Hello...
> 
> I'm trying to get a handle on implementation of wake-on-lan in an enterprise environment.  Cisco gear, lots of subnets.  I've made it work with directed broadcasts, but I'd really rather not have 40 or 50 'ip helper-address x.x.x.bcastaddr' statements on the vlans with the SMS servers.
> 
> Are there any enterprises that are doing this for large (100+) numbers of subnets?  I can't find a single example anywhere with more than 2 networks.
> 
> I've searched the Cisco-NSP archives as well with no luck, but maybe I didn't go back far enough.
> 
> Thanks for any help you can provide.
> 
> Berry Mobley
> 