Ubuntu – Replace Realtek r8168 network card to enable wake-on-lan

12.04realtekwakeonlan

I've been struggling with wake-on-lan (WoL) capability of my onboard Realtek RTL8111/8168B ethernet controller (MB: Gigabyte Z68AP-D3) for almost a week now. The main issue seems to be that network card is switched off completely during shutdown (i.e., both link and (act)ivity LED lights are off).

I made an extensive review of similar issues and tried the following (among others):

Putting ethtool -s eth0 wol g to rc.local file.
Installing latest r8168 driver(s) from Realtek.
Putting echo -n "my_lan_id" >> /proc/acpi/wakeup to rc.local file.
Switching WOL option on and off in BIOS.

I can find no way to prepare my NIC to work properly so I decided to try with external PCI network card. Please suggest me which network card should I try to enable WoL? (Maybe Intel® PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter?)

Best Answer

I found a solution, it works on my system (RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet + Ubuntu 12.04 AMD64). This bug report discribes the issue, and someone suggested that using the r8168 module instead of the r8169 module would do the trick. Also somewhere else I saw this can be done via dkms, but I'm in a rush this morning, so didn't get chance to look, this might help

wget http://r8168.googlecode.com/files/r8168-8.030.00.tar.bz2
tar xjf r8168-8.030.00.tar.bz2
cd r8168-8.030.00
./autorun.sh

Although I was doing this over ssh, it actually worked, the connection just locked for a while, but picked up again after the new module installed.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – No network connectivity with Realtek 8111d

Try this (from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=538448)

If your ethernet cable is connected at boot time and you are experiencing the no link problem, try this:

Shutdown, power down.
Unplug your host (this cuts power to the card if wake-on-lan power is maintained).
Wait 15 seconds.
Plug in.
Boot ubuntu.

Ubuntu – How to enable wake-on-lan permanently

A boot script run after the network cards are configured should do the trick. Ubuntu uses upstart. After reading about upstart jobs, ethtool, writing an upstart script, and searching the interwebs for a better solution, I came up with this from jevinskie (you'll want to put this in a file in /etc/init):

start on started network

script
    for interface in $(cut -d: -f1 /proc/net/dev | tail -n +3); do
        logger -t 'wakeonlan init script' enabling wake on lan for $interface
        ethtool -s $interface wol g
    done
end script

Starts when the nics are initialised
Grabs the nic names from /proc/net/dev
Logs actions to syslog
Acts on all nics found
Requires ethtool, so make sure it's installed first:
```
sudo apt-get install ethtool
```

If you want to imbue just one nic with the power of awakening, something like this is more appropriate:

start on started network

script
    interface=eth0
    logger -t 'wakeonlan init script' enabling wake on lan for $interface
    ethtool -s $interface wol g
end script

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – No network connectivity with Realtek 8111d

Ubuntu – How to enable wake-on-lan permanently

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