On 12/13/10 8:32 AM, Jack Bates wrote:
On 12/13/2010 10:20 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
WOL is unfortunately terribly deficient in that the spec. never envisioned the possibility of a need for wake on WAN.
Bottom line, it's a non-routeable layer 2 protocol. Your choices boil down to the helper address nightmare you describe or proxy servers on every subnet.
I would suspect that proxy servers being the better deal, though my experience with Cisco is that you may have to use ASR type gear to get a nicer layout (similar to service providers) where you can backend everything to a radius server (I'm still waiting to test this myself, but IOS is really weak on DHCP support).
assuming you don't mind burning an ip address per subnet you can do this with a static arp entry for an ethernet multicast address even if your l3 platform doesn't allow subnet directed multicast. on a firewall platform basied on linux I specifically worked around the deliberate lack of subnet directed broadcast by natting from the broadcast address of the target subnet to an rfc 1918 address on the subnet with a static arp entry pointing at a multicast address. it worked fine, exploited the fact that rewrite occurs before forwarding on linux and allowed the use of a pre-existing management tool that used subnet directed broadcasts.
Jack