![]() ![]() But Wake-on-LAN packets are special, and they need our help to get to where they’re going. Most of the time, this translation is done in the background while the user remains happily oblivious. ![]() Essentially, it serves as the local host’s “address book,” making sure requests to a given IP address are sent to the appropriate network interface. The ARP cache is an important part of any Ethernet network–it stores a table of every known host on the network by IP and MAC address. To find the MAC address we can use **arp**, a standard Linux utility, to read the local host’s ARP cache. So we can either make MAC address flash cards for our LAN, or we can write a wrapper script to find the MAC address for us and issue the packet. Sure, it’s a neat trick, but we have to know the destination machine’s MAC address. If the interface recognizes its own MAC address in the magic packet, the interface signals the host machine to “wake up.” The script broadcasts “magic packets” over the network that are read by WOL-compatible interfaces. It is available from the repositories for most Linux distributions. **wakeonlan** is a simple Perl script written by Jose Pedro Oliveira and maintained by Ico Doornekamp. But we don’t want to get up, so we’ll issue a Wake-on-LAN packet to the Mac instead, using **wakeonlan**. The workaround is simple: get up, walk over to the Mac, and hit the space bar or click the mouse to wake up the machine before trying to print. However, this creates an issue when printing from one of the other computers: if the Mac is asleep, the shared printer does not respond to requests. Because the Mac hosts all of our family photos, and because printing from a Mac to a Linux printer is a headache, it made the most sense for us to connect the printer directly to the Mac. Our home network includes a number of Linux-based systems and one Apple iMac. ![]()
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