ETHER-WAKE

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: March 31, 2003
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NAME

ether-wake - A tool to send a Wake-On-LAN "Magic Packet"

SYNOPSIS

ether-wake [options] Host-ID

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents the usage of the ether-wake command.

ether-wake is a program that generates and transmits a Wake-On-LAN (WOL) "Magic Packet", used for restarting machines that have been soft-powered-down (ACPI D3-warm state). It generates the standard AMD Magic Packet format, optionally with a password included. The single required parameter is a station (MAC) address or a host ID that can be translated to a MAC address by an ethers(5) database specified in nsswitch.conf(5)

OPTIONS

ether-wake needs a single dash (´-´) in front of options. A summary of options is included below.

-b: Send the wake-up packet to the broadcast address.
-D: Increase the Debug Level.
-i ifname: Use interface ifname instead of the default "eth0".
-p passwd: Append a four or six byte password to the packet. Only a few adapters need or support this. A six byte password may be specified in Ethernet hex format (00:22:44:66:88:aa) or four byte dotted decimal (192.168.1.1) format. A four byte password must use the dotted decimal format.
-V: Show the program version information.

EXIT STATUS

This program returns 0 on success. A permission failures (e.g. run as a non-root user) results in an exit status of 2. Unrecognized or invalid parameters result in an exit status of 3. Failure to retrieve network interface information or send a packet will result in an exit status of 1.

SECURITY

On some non-Linux systems dropping root capability allows the process to be dumped, traced or debugged. If someone traces this program, they get control of a raw socket. Linux handles this safely, but beware when porting this program.

AUTHOR

The etherwake program was written by Donald Becker at Scyld Computing Corporation for use with the Scyld() Beowulf System.