www.yevi.org/blog/2025-05-21-make-one-proxmox-node-to-wol-another/index.md

slug	title	tags	image
make-one-proxmox-node-to-wol-another	Make one Proxmox node to wake-on-lan another	self-hosting homelab Proxmox WOL	/img/homelab.png

Nothing is eternal, especially the relevance of documentation. I think help.ubuntu.com is an absolute winner, holding the largest number of outdated and irrelevant pages. But that's not a topic for today's post. One of my Proxmox cluster nodes can't power itself on after the outage. But it supports wake-on-LAN, so I decided that another node could power it on. And the simplicity of this task was overrated by me.

:::warning

Wake on LAN doesn't work across VLANs. Magic packets could be sent and received only inside a single subnet.

:::

The victim

First of all, even after enabling "Wake up on PCI event" or something in BIOS it was not working because WoL was still disabled on a software level. It can be checked with:

ethtool enp1s0

Where enp1s0 is a physical network interface of a Proxmox node, not a bridge.

There should be Wake-on: setting among others. In my case it was Wake-on: d, which means that wake-on-LAN is disabled, according to ethtool documentation:

p  Wake on phy activity
u  Wake on unicast messages
m  Wake on multicast messages
b  Wake on broadcast messages
a  Wake on ARP
g  Wake on MagicPacket(tm)
s  Enable SecureOn(tm) password for MagicPacket(tm)
d  Disable (wake on nothing).  This option clears  all  previous
    options.

We need to set it to wake by the MagicPacket(tm). We need to create a config file for this to be enabled on system start. But first we need to:

ip link show enp1s0

and write down our network device MAC address. Then create a file:

nano /etc/systemd/network/90-wakeonlan.link

with the next content:

[Match]
MACAddress=<mac-address-here>

[Link]
NamePolicy=kernel database onboard slot path
MACAddressPolicy=persistent
WakeOnLan=magic

After that we need to reboot and check WOL status again:

ethtool enp1s0

Now Wake-on should be set to g.

The one who bothering

On another node we need to install an util that will be sending a magic packet:

apt update
apt install etherwake

Now we can power the victim off and try to wake it with:

etherwake -i vmbr0 <mac_address>

Where vmbr0 is a bridge network interface of current Proxmox node, and <mac_address> is a MAC address of the victim's physical network interface.

If it works, we can now add a cron job to wake our victim upon current node startup, adding some delay to make sure the network is ready:

crontab -e

Cron job line to add:

@reboot sleep 30s && /usr/sbin/etherwake -i vmbr0 <mac_address>