NetworkManager Adds Wake-On-LAN Controls

Those controlling their network devices under Linux with NetworkManager will now be able to configure their Wake-on-LAN options for Ethernet connections.

As of this week, networkManager now has WoL ethernet support and the ability to adjust Wake-On-LAN properties from both its GUI and command-line programs.

The NetworkManager WoL support originates from this bug report last year, "I was to enable and use wake on lan on my RHEL7.0/CENTOS 7.0 system. I've enabled wake on lan from the bios. From internet search, i found that for earlier versions, we had to add ETHTOOL_OPTS="wol g" in the interfaces ifcfg file. but now, network manager controls the networking and even after adding that required option to the file, it's not persistent across reboots."

This week the support was added to NetworkManager, exposing the properties, and making them accessible from the CLI too.

The Wake-On-LAN support will be found in the upcoming NetworkManager 1.0.6 release. It's good to see WOL support landing; within the 50+ benchmark server room, Phoromatic automatically manages the systems powering down and powering up (via WoL), etc, when needed. However, for about a dozen or so of the 50 systems, their integrated NICs have flaky WoL support even with BIOS upgrades, etc. It will be interesting to see if the NetworkManager upgrade handles things differently to have any positive effect.