SOLUTION: Orange Livebox: Wake-on-LAN Port Forward

Hello folks.
I am an Orange Broadband user in the UK. I wanted to setup WakeOnLan (WOL) over the internet on one of my machines in my home network.(FYI - WakeonLAN ables you to send a 'magic packet' to the NIC on your machine to boot it via the internet).

There are websites which will send the magic packet to your IP address and then to the NIC of the machine you want to wake up.

Couple of pre-requisites
NB. I assume your technical knowledge is sufficient to not need exact step-by-step to setup port forwarding. And you understand how to setup static IP addresses etc on your network.


1. Your NIC must be able to support Wake on Lan
2. Change your BIOS to enable Wake on Lan
3. The MAC address of your NIC.
4. The IP address (internet IP) or DNS name (if you use Dynamic DNS etc) of your PC.
5. Port-forwarding to UDP Port 9
6. You use STATIC IP address in your LAN !!!!



So, how do set it up for Orange Livebox?!
Here is the solution that works 100% for me.

After hours of trying to get it to work, I discovered that the livebox will NOT port forward to the broadcast address (ie. 192.168.1.255)

In order for WOL to work successfully, you need to be able to port forward to the broadcast address.
Thus, as the livebox does not let you do that - I thought there was no way to get WOL over internet to work.

However, Livebox DOES let you port foward to specific IP address in your network successfully. For example you can port forward 80 for http, and 22 for SSH etc.

So, if you want WOL over the internet to work using an Orange Livebox, you will need a second router that DOES allow port forwarding to the Broadcast address (ie 192.168.1.255)
A good router that DOES allow this is the Linksys BEFSR4 or 8 ADSL Router (not Wifi enabled)


So, here is how I set it up to work:


Internet
|
Orange Live Box Port forward any UDP port 9 to 192.168.0.2 port 9
(LAN IP 192.168.0.1)
|
|
(WAN Static IP: 192.168.0.2)
Linksys BESFR41v3 Port forward any UDP port 9 to 192.168.1.255 port 9
(LAN IP address: 192.168.1.1)
|
|
Networked PC
(192.168.1.10)
(default gateway 192.168.1.1)
(NIC MAC address: xxxxxxxxxxxx)


So, using a web-based WOL tool (like http://www.remotewakeup.com/en/index.php) you can boot the PC that is at 192.168.1.10.

You need to go to the Advance Configuration of the Livebox and choose Router. In that section you need to setup the port forwarding for UDP 9 to go to the router address 192.168.0.2

Then on the Linksys Router you need to port forward UDP 9 incoming to 192.168.1.255 (broadcast address)



Here is the flow:
You need to input on the remotewakeup.com with following info:
IP Hostname: yourdyndnsname.com
MAC-Address: xxxxxxxxxxxx (the mac address of the NIC on the PC you want to wake up)
Port: 9

So the site sends the magic packet to yourdyndnsname.com, NIC MAC address and port 9, the orange Livebox then receives the UDP packet on port 9, it then forwards (as per the rule setup) to the Linksys Router. The Linksys router then forwards (as per the rule setup) port 9 UDP to the 192.168.1.255 (broadcast address) on the network.

Now the magic packet is being broadcast to the network, it specifies the MAC-address, and will be forwarded to the NIC on the PC.

The Magic-Packet will Wake the PC, and voila, the PC will boot remotely.


So, in summary - the only way I could get a PC to Wake-on-LAN over the internet using Orange Livebox - was to add a router that allows port forwarding to the broadcast address.

Hopefully, this is somewhat easy enough to follow.

Good luck! It's not as complicated as it seems! Now you can wake your PC when you need it, and save power and the environment by not leaving it on all the time!!!

Alessandro

PS. I forgot to mention you need make sure you set the MTU on both routers the same!! MTU - 1492. I think Orange has default of 1492 for PPoE, so make sure the Linksys has MTU enabled and set to 1492.