First of all, many thanks to those of you who have posted your experiences here -- reading though them helped answer a lot of my questions as I chose and then configured my Squeezeboxes.
To save power and noise, I didn't want the WinXP machine on which I have SlimServer installed to run 24/7; I prefer to leave it in standby, and use the wireless SB3's wake-on-lan feature to bring it up when needed. However, as is the case with others in these forums, my server also connects to the network wirelessly. Since most wireless cards don't support wake-on-lan, I needed to find a workaround. Due to server placement, I can't simply connect the server to my router with ethernet cable; the server has to be wireless. As many before have mentioned, the issue with getting WoL to work is that, although the signal can be sent wirelessly, it ultimately needs to be _received_ through a wired NIC for the computer to wake up. So I needed to find a way to convert that wireless WoL signal to something that could be pushed through the wired NIC of a wireless PC. Following from a variant on Jim's suggestion in this thread on 08 Nov, here's what I did (it requires some extra hardware lying around, but it works): 1) PC running SlimServer has two NICs: 1 wireless and 1 wired. This PC connects to a wireless router, and the internet, through the wireless NIC. 2) I had a second (disused) Netgear wireless router lying around. Since the wired NIC on the server was unused, and _does_ provide wake-on-lan capability, I connected this wired NIC to one of the wired ports on the second router. There is nothing "upstream" of this router. It just sits atop my wireless server, unconnected to the outside world. Its sole purpose is to serve Squeezeboxes via the _wired_ NIC on the PC. The PC, though, is still wireless. There's no Cat5 connecting it to the "primary" router, and no Cat5 between the secondary and primary routers. 3) I configured the second router to create a new wireless network (call it "SqueezeboxesOnly" or some such). Now there are two wireless networks in the house: the original network, which all the PCs (including the server) connect to and use to get online, and the second network, which only the Squeezeboxes (and the server, through its wired port) use. 4) Because the server is connected to a router through its wired NIC, when a Squeezebox sends a WoL signal wirelessly, my secondary router routes it to the PC through the ethernet cable, and the PC rouses from its sleep. 5) Windows, for all its faults, behaves happily with two functional NICs. The PC maintains a wireless connection to the original network, allowing internet traffic to get through, while the wired connection to the SqueezeboxesOnly network handles music. 6) The only problem in this setup is that the Squeezeboxes can't yet connect to the internet -- they can only connect to the SlimServer, because there's nothing upstream of the dedicated wireless router they're on (they can still display RSS feeds, though, since the PC that sends them to each SB3 can connect to the internet). I'm hopeful that WinXP's network bridging feature will help rectify this, but I haven't been able to get it work yet. Nonetheless, having the ability to do a wake-on-lan to a wireless PC is worth the lack of internet connectivity to me, since I don't listen to much internet radio (I prefer XM ;) (And for what it's worth, I don't seem to be having the problem that others have mentioned about the PC not staying awake after WoL; I actually have the opposite problem - it won't go back to sleep after no activity from the SB3, even after the timeout specified in Power Management). Perhaps this will help someone else... -- mkdprice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mkdprice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3135 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17891 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
