Is there a way that the rioreceiver can "wake up" a computer? '

Apparently I do not have an ethernet card that is capable of "remote wake up". However, the card for the phone line (that comes with the sonic blue unit) does have that capability. I am dedicating an old HP computer for music throughout the house and I need a "remote wake up" option. I'll just use phone lines instead of cat5. What a great product, and under $100.

Steve

Is there a way that the rioreceiver can "wake up" a computer?

Yes. When you hit the power switch (to resume, not from hard power off), the Receiver will broadcast the necessary magic to wake up the PC that it originally got its firmware from.

Assuming you've got a network card and BIOS that support Wake-on-LAN (for that is what it's called), then it ought to wake up your PC (assuming you turned on that setting in the BIOS).

You say in your other post that you don't, however.

You say in your other post that you don't, however.

Correct, but I will buy the correct card today and give it another shot, if not, I'll just stick with the phone lines.
Thanks,
Steve

Thanks Roger, it works with the wake-on lan card. A great product just got better.
Steve

Interesting. So the Rio automatically broadcasts the "magic packet" to the PC that last served it?

That's cool, but I might not always want it. Is there a way to turn it off? I'm not sure I want my desktop PC awakened automatically each time a Rio comes on. Also:

I will initially use my Receivers with my windoze desktop PC and the included Rio server software. Later, I intend to switch to one of the open source servers running on another machine (either a Linux or windoze server, not the desktop PC).

At that point, I'll definitely want to stop the Rio from waking the desktop PC it worked with initially. Will switching to another server stop the Rio from signalling that original PC? Or, is there a way to selectively enable/disable the Rio's magic packet send behavior on startup?

More info about magic packets and WOL:
WOL and the Magic Packet
Using Wake-On-LAN with Linux

I use this Perl script on windoze or Linux to wake up machines equipped with a NIC supporting WOL. Works great:
"Magic packet" generating script

First up: The Receiver has no permanent storage. It has no way of remembering stuff between hard power cycles (i.e. removing the cable).

Is there a way to turn it off?

Not at the Receiver end, no. Turn it off on the PC.

signalling that original PC?

The "original PC" is the one from which it loaded its software (via NFS). If you use an NFS server on the Linux box, it'll attempt to wake the Linux box.

In reply to:

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First up: The Receiver has no permanent storage. It has no way of remembering stuff between hard power cycles (i.e. removing the cable).

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Well, it may not use the 512KB Flash ROM to store stuff across boots with the current client software, but it could. That Flash storage is non-volatile.

Further, if the Rio is in fact waking the host PC but doesn't know the MAC address of said PC, then it must be sending a broadcast WOL "magic" packet to all PCs on the net. As far as I know, there is no such magic packet. The packet is in fact sent as a "broadcast," but contains the MAC (hardware) address of exactly one NIC.

So does the Receiver really send a WOL/magic packet at all? I'm starting to wonder about the validity of that claim.

In reply to:

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Turn it [WOL] off on the PC.

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No. I don't want to disable the PC's ability to Wake On LAN. I use it to manually wake that PC from across the network. I just don't want the Receiver waking that PC.

It only sends the WOL magic packet when it is woken from it's own sleeping state by hitting the power button, as Roger said above:

When you hit the power switch (to resume, not from hard power off), the Receiver will broadcast the necessary magic to wake up the PC that it originally got its firmware from.

So it does know the details of the PC it booted from, because it booted from it, got put into it's sleep state (where the screen is blank but the processor is still running the Linux kernel and the receiver client) and then awoken from it.

On a reboot (for example when you first power it up at the mains) it doesn't send a WOL magic packet, because it doesn't know where it's server is yet.

Ah. Thanks for clearing that up. I'm new here, and didn't know that the Receivers have a sleep state.

Yes, in theory it could use the flash. However, there are at least 3 different types of flash in use on receivers, all with different block layouts - some with parameter blocks, some without, etc.

The design was originally going to use an OTP rom. This didn't happen, and as we'd designed it to never need to write to the flash, they just picked any old flash chips - Intel, Micron, SST...

The Rio does send a WOL packet *coming out of suspend* - *not* on cold boots. Obviously, to be suspended it needed to have booted software from somewhere, hence it knows where to send the WOL packet to.

There are two WOL packet types, that we send. The first is (I believe) the standard WOL, which is a broadcast containing a byte sequence which can be easily detected by the mostly-asleep ethernet chipset - 6 bytes of 0xFF followed by the MAC address to wake repeated 16 times.

The second is just a single UDP packet addressed to the last server; this will either go direct or generate an ARP request, either of which will wake a PNA card (which doesn't need the WOL mumbo jumbo).

There are plenty of people who use WOL with the receiver, meaning it really does send addressed WOL packets. Either that or the server PCs are just waking up by magic...

Hugo