Remotely waking computers behind newer TP Link routers

2020-04-06

I just bought a TP-Link AX 3000 to replace my old router. My previous router had OpenWrt on it – so to wake up any of my home computers remotely, I could just ssh to my router and run wol. OpenWRT is’t yet supported on this router, however it’s possible to enable with the stock firmware. Here’s how:

1. Open the Router web configuration interface, and switch to the “Advanced” tab.

2. Go to Network » DHCP server » Address reservation, assign a static IP to machine you want.

3. Go to Security » IP & Mac Binding. Find your machine in the “ARP list”, and click the link icon on the far right. It should then show up in the “Binding list” below, and be listed as “Bound” in the ARP list.

4. Go to NAT Forwarding » Virtual Servers and create a new service called WakeOnLan:

   • Set external port to anything (say 9999)
   • Set internal port to 9
   • Set internal IP to the static address of your machine.

5. Create a service for SSH, whatever other services you need. (Changing the external SSH port to something other than 22 reduces the number of brute force attacks on your router by a lot.)

6. Go to Network » Dynamic DNS and enable one of the many services.

7. Now you can wake your computer remotely by:

   wakeonlan -p 9999 -i router.tplinkdns.com <Mac Address>
   

   and then connect to it by

   ssh -p XXXX router.tplinkdns.com
   

   For multiple computers, just assign different external ports for each computer.

🗫 Comments

• 

  Unreliable. Better to use OpenVPN

  Gautam Iyer (2020-04-14 10:56:09 EDT)

  Update: This isn’t as reliable as I would like, and doesn’t consistently work across router / machine reboots. The stock firmware, however, has OpenVPN. If you enable this you can wol as usual.

• 

  Remotely waking computers behind newer TP Link routers

  Russel Longs (2020-08-21 05:31:09 EDT)

  Same procedure we can follow for the Netgear Router by accessing Login its webpage.

• 

  Thank you

  Ian Miell (2021-11-27 02:49:11 EST)

  Thank you for posting this. It helped me set up truly remote WOL on my noisy home server.

• 

  5. Create a service for SSH ??? and Step 7 ???

  winger (2021-12-21 01:36:27 EST)

  What does Step 5. Create a service for SSH mean? I am following everything up until this step.

  Also, Step 7. Now you can wake your computer remotely by: wakeonlan -p 9999 -i router.tplinkdns.com

  Where do you type this and is router.tplinkdns.com the Host Name of the dynamic DNS service we setup??

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