Hello.

I was willing to post this in the home network community, but it is not active at all… So I hope this is the right place, as I use a self hosted wireguard and pihole.

I’m just a hobbyist whose first language is not English, so please, bare with me :)

So I use Wireguard Easy to create a tunnel to my home network to use pihole on my phone and access my services from outside.

I have an app to wake my home computer on LAN that is working fine when I’m home. I’d like to be able to wake it from outside and I don’t know how.

A few things are bugging me. If I’m connected to my home network, shouldn’t I be able to WoL my computer as long as I use my tunnel ?

And, on some occasions, I was able to WoL my PC when I wasn’t home (I remember doing it once when I was visiting my parents).

Can someone ELI5 this please ?

Thanks for your help :)

  • aardEnglish
    12•1 year ago

    WoL works as Ethernet¹ broadcast, while Wireguard routes IP, one level above that. So for the purpose of WoL the two ends of the Wireguard tunnel are in two different, not connected networks. In theory you might be able to make it work using subnet directed broadcasts - though creating some means to trigger the WoL packet on where you’re terminating your Wireguard might be easier to manage.

    Simple option would be just logging in via SSH to trigger it (you could script that - define a host in your SSH client config that just executes a command on connection), or something like a simple web frontend which will then trigger the WoL event.

    ¹ it is probably fair to assume nowadays that you’re using Ethernet, and not something like Token Ring. In case you do it still works the same, just the terminology is different.

    • TiritibambixOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Thanks for the explanation. I ended up remotely installing UpSnap. Works like a charm :)

    • @PriorProjectEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      This is a very strong explanation of what’s going on. And as a follow-up, I believe that ZeroTier present a single Ethernet broadcast domain, and so WoL tricks are more likely to work naturally there than with Wireguard. I haven’t used ZeroTier, and I do use Wireguard via Tailscale/Headscale. I’ve never missed the Ethernet features of ZeroTier and they CAN result in a very chatty wan if you’re not careful. But I think ZT would make this straightforward.

      Though as other people note… the simplest/least-disruptive change is probably to expose some scripty thing on the rpi that can be triggered via be triggered over a routed protocol and then have the rpi emit the Ethernet broadcast packets from the physical network.