Does Wake on LAN stop working when Alexa connects directly to the internet via a hard-wired Ethernet connection?
Does Wake on LAN stop working when Alexa connects directly to the internet via a hard-wired Ethernet connection?
WoL is such a painful thing to get to work now that microsoft has gotten bios manufactures to support their proprietary modes. Still if it works from other machines then that is not the problem. So the way WoL is suppose to work is the device sends a packet to the broadcast mac address ie FFFF:FFFF:FFFF. Inside the packet the mac address needs to appear in a very particular pattern. What you find are implementations that cheat this standard. The most common one is they send it to the mac address of the end device and not the broadcast mac. The other they include things like IP packet headers even though WoL is not IP based. Depending on how strictly the motherboard implements WoL these variations may or may not work.....they tend to work more than not. You have already done what I recommend to test this. Wireshark should see the WoL packets even when the machine is fully running. What I would do is try to capture data from the mac address of the alexa just to be sure it is not sending the data in the improper format. Note the mac address will likely be different when it is send from the wifi and the ethernet adapters. I suspect the alexa is not actually sending the packet. Would be nice if you could run wireshark on alexa or if switches that allowed you to monitor other ethernet ports were cheaper. My guess would be is there is either a bug or restriction in the USB/ethernet adapter that is blocking data send to the broadcast mac. Although that would be strange since DHCP is sent that way also. Note you should be able to see the DHCP request the alexa makes on your pc with wireshark. You likely have to power cycle it so it forgets where the dhcp server is. A added though will the alexa function at all if you plug it directly into the pc without a internet connection. That way you could use wireshark to grab it. Can the alexa connect to the internet via wifi and still use the ethernet.
Sorry for the late reply, but I got too busy with some unexpected things. Anyway, Alexa isn't working right now and I don't know how to connect it directly to my PC. What should I try? Because I have to connect both Alexa and give her internet access if that's the case. If I plug Alexa into the PC via ethernet cable but put Alexa on wifi instead, maybe it works. But then I can't check if everything is fine because even though Alexa connects to wifi, I wouldn't know how to test it properly. At this point I think the adapter itself might be stopping those packets from going through. Is there a way to see what Alexa sends out?
The only reason I suggested hooking it up to a PC is just because it's the easiest way to see exactly what data the port is sending. You would need a special switch that can copy all packets going to the alexa and send them over another port. This feature is usually called port monitoring or mirroring, but there are some small "managed" switches that have this ability. I know tplink has one but I don't remember the exact model number. You could look at something like a microtik RB260GS for about $50. It's been years since I played with those microtiks and they seem to have changed the hardware, not sure what happened. It should still have that port mirror option though. These types of switches get really complicated to set up because they have so many features built in.