cant send wake on lan packets on “down” ports
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disabled auto neg because it was waking my server. However, I am unable to send wake on lan packets because pfsense treats it as down. How do I force pfsense to send traffic to “down” links?
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@diyfoolwall if you’ve plugged the server directly into pfSense I suggest a cheap switch in between. Otherwise when the interface goes down/up various pfSense services restart due to the “new” interface.
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The NIC of the server can / should only press the power-on button if it receives the secret magic wake up packet : the packet should have a data payload of exactly 3 times its own MAC address. Nothing more, nothing less.
To be able to receive this packet, the NIC itself should be powered on. Most ofthen, the NIC goes in low power mode, something like "10 Mbit half duplex' as this is the most economic mode.
If the NIC in front of the server doesn't support this mode : wake on lan won't work. This is what probable happened : pfSense sees the NIC (link) down, so it can't use the NIC to send the WOL packet.
That's why its best always to use a switch between any pfSense NIC's, and your LAN(s) devices, as switches accepts the full scale of 10 Mbits/half up to 1 Gbit/full as this is their job.
