Cool - let us know how it works. I am still dumbfounded I actually got it to work. I swear I have tried probably 100 times at various site over the last 2-3 years and never once has it worked....

nope
 

bluehz, no luck! :( I think I set up port forwarding on the router to only the LAN IP address of my iMac, which is a state address. I'll try referring to the whole subnet and see if that makes a difference. I'm just noticing in your directions that you emphasize this.

Re: nope
 

From what I read when machine is asleep it no longer has an identifiable IP address thats why they say you have to broadcast to your whole subnet. So every machine gets the signal to wake, but only the one with the actual matching MAC address accepts the command.

This is probably a stupid question but how do you work out what your broadcast address is? My router's internal ip is 192.168.0.1 and my machine is 192.168.0.2 but when I try to configure the router to port-forward to 192.168.0.255 it generates an error -"Invalid IP address". Am I missing something obvious?

No - that is the correct broadcast address.... hmmm... wonder what thats about.... let me look into it.... hope its not a "feature of D-Link" routers since I just bought one.

EDIT
I am seeing a few reports of other not being able to set that address either, but its not necessarily brand related and no solution is listed.

How are you trying to port forward? I think the proper way in your D-Link router is via Virtual Servers settings. Not sure how helpful this is... but I just discovered that D-Link has a really nice emulator on their site, I went in and messed around with it and it let me set the address to UDP/9 192.168.0.255.... but then again it is just an emulator. Nice feature of website.
http://support.dlink.com/techtool/di...ator/login.htm

It may be that I'm doing something wrong with one of the other router settings (though I've left most of them alone). I've put a screenshot on my iDisk (broadcast.pdf, www.homepage.mac.com/djn1) that shows the settings and the error dialog. I can't see anything wrong with the way I've done this but you might want to take a look and see if anything strikes you.

[edit] the error dialog appears after I click the modify button.[/edit]

hosts 0 and 255 are reserved.

a broadcast address is 255.255.255.255

you don't want to forward anything to the broadcast address. the incoming packets should already have the broadcast address.

i think

Merv - according to the wake-on-lan crowd you HAVE to send the signal to the broadcast address for your subnet... thats the only way it will work.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/wake...nlan~mode=shut

Did you notice that there were a couple of people in the first thread who reported that they couldn't set their routers to the broadcast address?

Yes - I noticed that BUT I never saw an explaination or solution... ain't forums great..... hahaha..

also - did a rather extensive search and could find no info regarding it being illegal to set address to 192.168.0.255. It looks like your settings are correct as far as I can tell from PDF. I doubt this has anything to do with it, and I know nothing about it - but what is the SSID stuff that has to do with wireless. It does some sort of broadcasting and I am wondering if it has reserved the *.255 for itself. I had no problems at all setting 192.168.0.255 on my old Linksys.

I don't know :confused:

I have been reading that it is customary to reserve the 192.168.0.255 address for broadcast - this is a given. You technically should never use that address for anything... for example you would never want to assign that to a machine... so I am wondering if the router is imposing some error checking basically saying "nice try - but I'm not going to let you use that address". If so that would be a bummer - because you are NOT assigning that address to anything - you are just opening the pipe for that address to get through the router so it should have no effect. Is there a free tech support phone for your router?

I don't know - I'll check it out tomorrow - it's 1am here :yawn ;)

Your broadcast address depends on what your subnetmask is. (You might want to check what the router has as its mask, although I cannot see it making a difference in this case)

If your subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 and you network address is 192.168.0.0 then your broadcast address is 192.168.0.255. Valid addresses are 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.254 inclusive.

If your subnet mask is 255.255.254.0 and you network address is 192.168.0.0 then your broadcast address is 192.168.1.255. Valid addresses are 192.168.0.1-192.168.1.254 inclusive, including 192.168.0.255 as a valid address.

There is nothing inherently magic about the 0 or 255 addresses. The highest and lowest address on the network are reserved though.

whatmask is a useful utility for this (gui version:whatmask)Your PDF shows that you are already mapping port 9. Could that be the problem (along with an unclear error message)?




edit: PS. ipcalc is pretty cool too

stetner - do you think it may be that the router has idiotproofed the high/low addresses to prevent people from using them? Thats the only thing I can figure - I had no problem setting my router to *255 setting, but I read on the DSLreports forums about people trying to do the WOL and they too could not set address to *255. I am thinking the routers are confined to the useable addresses - just to keep people from getting in trouble.

BTW - thx for the whatmask info - I was looking for something like that to mention in my instructions on using WOL. I'm going to submit the WOL tip to the main MacOSXHints - I hope you don't mind if I include the "whatmask" info also...

I just noticed I already have the "whatmask" binary installed - do you know if that comes pre-installed with OS X or is it something I compiled and added at some point?

I would hope not, but some of these low end routers do have some restrictions built in, so I guess only the manufacturer would know...Yeah, no problem here either (Netgear).Not at all, I just googled for it...Looks like it is in fink, could have come from there. Cheers

whatmask
 

It's not a part of the OS X 10.1 or 10.2 default installs. The likeliest source was fink:
fink list | grep whatmask

Re: whatmask
 

bluehz, I'm using a Macsense router with the following settings:

Private IP address: 192.168.1.1 (the router's address)
LAN subnet: 255.255.255.0

Public IP: 68.98.206.49
I've set port forwarding to use UDP and port 9 to direct to 192.168.1.255.

Using the link you shared with us, I input

Ethernet address: from my iMac
Public IP: 68.98.206.49
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.255
Port: 9

The response page showed that a magic packet had been sent to the correct card number at the correct IP address. No wake. Any ideas?

phil - your info looks good. Did you include the colons in your ethernet address or not - you should NOT include colons.

Other than that - I have no idea. I swear I sat here and did it approx 10 times on 2 diff machines... I am starting to think each router manufacture is different in terms of whether they will actually let you use the broadcast address or not. Interestingly enough - I just bought a new router I was going to install this afternoon anyway - so that will be a good test. I am going to go back and try it again with my current router (Linksys) then I am going to switch out the routers and try it again.

Which of the packet sniffing utilities would be good to watch for the packets coming into the LAN from outside? MOst of them spit out so much info - and with my untrained eye - I suspect it would fly right by me.

bluehz, no colons on the ethernet address. Guess I'm just out of luck on this one. It would be nice, but, oh well . . .