I am trying to set up my homelab to boot whenever it is being accessed. I set up wake on LAN for unicast, and it works fine for a while after shutting down the system. It stops working after a few hours of the server being turned off, though.
From what I’m gathering online, the issue is that my router uses an ARP cache. Before that gets flushed, it still works. However, it seems like my router does not allow me to configure a static ARP entry (using a ISP provided router). I already set a static IP for my server in the router, but it still won’t work a few hours.
Is there any way to make this work? I just want to allow a friend of mine to boot my server whenever they try to access a service on it.
The most straight-forward method would be to buy a standalone switch. I have a TP-LINK TL-SG108 8-port gigabit switch and it seems to retain the ARP table indefinitely.
My previous solution was an ESP32 board with an SSH server and a relay, wired parallel with the power switch, that would be closed by an output pin on command.
I’ll look into my options regarding a different switch or router, thanks.
However your solution with the ESP32 would require me to manually trigger the boot, no? At that point I can just use the magic packet, which works fine already.