Remotely wake NAS with WOL

[ellismatt]

Can we please have a built in wake-on-lan daemon which will send WOL packets to my DLNA enabled NAS drive every couple of minutes?

My media is stored on a Buffalo Linkstation. It's power settings are 'on', 'off' and 'auto'. In the latter setting the drive can be woken by a wake-on-lan command as long as one is sent at least every 360 seconds. This job is currently performed by my PC via the 'NAS navigator' software from Buffalo. It would be great to be able to be able stream from the NAS straight to PlugPlayer without having to have the PC running or having the NAS permanently powered up.

Otherwise this is a great bit of software. I love the recent addition of AirPlay support.

[abramsh]

WOL has been asked for in the past; I'll bump it up on the list a bit higher.

[Noxon]

I double that. It's a really neat feature. Apples Remote does it as well since a more recent release.

[abramsh]

I'll bump it up the list a bit.

[tomi]

Hi,

Any News about this? I think that this a major feature in times like these where saving energy is really required. Also WOL should be available for the client devices and not only for the Mediaservers.

In the ideal case I just fire up the app on my iPad in the living room and start to listen to music without the need to start the NAS or the streaming client.

I'd really appreciate to have this function in.

Thanks a lot.

Tom / Austria

[abramsh]

I can move it up higher on the list, but most NAS devices can spin down drives and lower CPU rate so their energy consumption isn't much more than standby with network access.

I don't know of any renders with WOL support; do you know of one that you want supported?

[tomi]

You're right: There are apparently no WOL capable DLNA renderers out there. I just wonder why this is the case?

In any case: WOL support for DLNA Mediaservers would be really great.

Looking forward to the next release ...

Cheers // Tom

[ellismatt]

Although brands like Westen Digital do spin down their drives but remain connected when idle and so would not need this feature, it's the Buffalo Linkstation which would benefit most. It's power saving option when in 'Auto' mode is to enter standby if it doesn't receive a wake on LAN magic packet every 360 seconds. The reason for this is presumably because it was designed with PC use in mind and the proprietary Buffalo PC software runs in the background and repeatedly sends the magic packet as long as it is running.

What I hope to be able to achieve is accessing DLNA content from the server on my iPhone or iPad without needing the PC to be turned on too. Currently I can use a separate iPhone app (SleepOver) to wake up the NAS but it shuts down again after a couple of minutes. If the PlugPlayer app had an option to send a magic packet every couple of minutes this would solve the problem.

I recognise that this is quite a niche feature as it only seems to be necessary for Buffalo NAS drives but they're quite popular and it may be useful for other brands too. The way I would implement it is to have an option similar to the SSDP re-advertisment switch in the device settings menu. Perhaps 'Keep awake with WOL' - if switched to On, the user would be presented with two further text boxes, one for the device MAC address and the other for the interval between which magic packets should be sent. Perhaps there could also be an option to automatically send the magic packet as soon as PlugPlayer starts.