VOGONS


First post, by WildW

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Could someone educate me as to what's happening in this picture please? I've been messing with computers since this one was new, and I've never seen a network card with cable headers and a wire off to the motherboard like this.

nwcable.jpg

So far my only idea is maybe it's for a network activity LED on the case? (The case doesn't have such a thing)

Reply 3 of 7, by WildW

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Deksor wrote:

Yep, that's wake on lan

Aha, a thing I've disabled in many BIOSes over the years. So, that can't be done through the PCI bus, or couldn't back then? Machine here is Intel BX chipset.

Reply 5 of 7, by Errius

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I got WOL sort-of-working with my old 440BX box, but it only worked when you physically shut down the computer by pressing the button, not when you shut down the system from Windows. So you could remotely wake up the computer, use it, and shut it down again, but you couldn't wake it up again after that. I never did figure out why.

The network card was also a 3Com similar to this one.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 6 of 7, by shamino

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WOL started to work without a cable later on, maybe it was allowed by a later revision of the PCI spec or something. The older setup uses a cable.
I remember this is one of the minor differences in between the Intel 8255x series of chips. The 82559 doesn't use a WOL header, I think the 557 and 558 do.

Getting WOL to work exactly the way you intend is kind of clunky and can be frustrating, or at least that's been my experience with it. IMO it's a great concept but not one that got developed sufficiently.

Reply 7 of 7, by elod

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shamino wrote:

Getting WOL to work exactly the way you intend is kind of clunky and can be frustrating, or at least that's been my experience with it. IMO it's a great concept but not one that got developed sufficiently.

It's useful for managed networks (rolling out updates overnight for example) and usually works just fine with business class machines.
On newer aquisitions (Gigabyte Brix) I noticed that in order to enable it you have to disable <0.5W standby in the BIOS Setup.