Enabling Wake on LAN on Proxmox on a 2011 MacBook Pro

[xavax]

Hello,

I have Proxmox installed on a 2011 MacBook Pro, and I would like to enable Wake on LAN. Is this possible?

Thank you.

 

[Max Carrara]

There are two prerequisites:

• WOL must be enabled in the NIC driver
• Your BIOS (or EFI) must be configured correctly

I can't really help you with the latter (you should be able to look that up though), but regarding the driver, you can do the following:

1. Check whether WOL is enabled on your NIC:
   

   ethtool <NIC> | grep 'Wake-on:'

   The output should show Wake-on: g - that means it's enabled.
   
   
2. If WOL isn't enabled like shown above, you have to insert a line with ethernet-wol g into your network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces, like so for example:
   

   iface <NIC> inet manual
           # [...]
           ethernet-wol g

   
   
3. Alternatively, you can also use post-up /sbin/ethtool -s <NIC> wol g instead of ethernet-wol g:
   

   iface <NIC> inet manual
           # [...]
           post-up /sbin/ethtool -s <NIC> wol g

Note: In the above, <NIC> obviously refers to the name of your network interface. Make sure to configure your actual (physical) NIC and not for example the bridge you use for your VMs (vmbr0 or similar). Usually goes without saying, but still wanted to mention it, just to make sure.

To provide a complete example -- since my NIC is named enp5s0, my configuration looks something like this:

auto enp5s0
iface enp5s0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.100/24
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        post-up /sbin/ethtool -s enp5s0 wol g

Hope this helps!

 

[xavax]

Thank you, I don't know how to do this part on a Mac; the rest is done.
• Your BIOS (or EFI) must be configured correctly

 

[sw-omit]

Having a quick look around [1] There seems to be no way to get into bios/efi on a macbook, so it is either already set up correctly and it works, or you're out of luck. If it doesn't work, the only thing I can think of, is that you first need to have it set up earlier on mac itself [2] which then sets it into the 'hidden' bios/efi, which then allows it for other OS's as well.

[1] https://macpaw.com/how-to/mac-bios-mode
[2] https://technotim.live/posts/wake-on-lan/

 

[xavax]

Hi

I installed macOS on an external SSD connected to the same machine, but I couldn't configure Wake on LAN or automatic startup.

Here's what I did:

Start macOS from the external SSD:

I started my MacBook Pro 2011 using macOS installed on the external SSD.

 

[xavax]

I did this:

ethtool -s enp2s0f0 wol g

root@pve:~# ethtool enp2s0f0 | grep 'Wake-on:'
Supports Wake-on: g
Wake-on: g

After rebooting, it reverts to d:

root@pve:~# ethtool enp2s0f0 | grep 'Wake-on:'
Supports Wake-on: g
Wake-on: d

I don't understand how to make it persistent.

 

[Max Carrara]

I don't understand how to make it persistent.

Try editing your network configuration at /etc/network/interfaces as I had described above. Does WOL work, even it it's not persistent?