> DATE: Thu 19 Dec 2024 18:35 By: konsthol@pm.me

# The magic of Wake-On-LAN

Years ago, some good friends of mine gifted me a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM for my birthday. It’s hands down the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received, perfectly matching my hobbies. They were lucky to even find one during the chip shortage! I initially used it as a VPN server with WireGuard and played around with Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking.

Eventually, I got into cloud computing and started hosting multiple services on a VPS I rent from MVPS. This VPS, with its 4GB of RAM, currently runs several of my daily-use services like Gitea, Searx, NTFY, and more. Although the Raspberry Pi could theoretically handle these services, its 2GB of RAM limited simultaneous operations.

One day, it hit me: why not use the Raspberry Pi for a simpler project like a Wake-On-LAN (WOL) server? It requires minimal resources and just needs to stay on and send WOL packets. The Raspberry Pi is connected via Wi-Fi to the same network as my laptop. Normally, waking up my laptop with WOL would require an Ethernet cable connection to the router, but I connected one end to the Pi and the other to the laptop.

I started with a simple shell script using etherwake, a command-line tool to send WOL packets. After enabling WOL in my laptop’s BIOS and confirming it on the OS using ethtool, I could easily wake my laptop remotely using a Termux shortcut on my phone, which SSHed into the Raspberry Pi to execute the etherwake command.

Though this setup worked perfectly fine, I wanted to make it even better. Initially, the Raspberry Pi only ran SSH and executed a command to wake my laptop. So it wasn't really a WOL server. After some research, I found Flask and created an actual WOL server. This server had routes, authentication, logging, rate limits, and more to ensure robustness and security.

What makes my Flask-based server so cool is its dynamic nature. I can configure a .env file with multiple device MAC addresses, allowing numerous routes for different devices. For instance, I have LAPTOP_MAC="itsmac" and DESKTOP_MAC="itsmac", enabling me to wake them via HTTP requests at /wol/laptop and /wol/desktop, respectively.

One open-source application that fits my use case is HTTP Shortcuts from F-Droid. After configuring a specific route, I can turn it into a widget on my home screen. This way, I can wake my laptop up with just a tap! Plus, I use dynamic DNS, so my Pi is accessible from anywhere.

=> /images/pic-selected-19-12-24_19-10-42.png The project's mascot

I would suggest anyone to take a look at my project's repo and if they find that it fits their needs, use the setupSingleBinary.sh script to grab the latest executable. The repo is over at

=> https://git.konsthol.eu/konsthol/WOL-Ly WOL-Ly

=> ..
