René Rebe

The wonders of the WinDOwS DOS legacy. Not only does the the command line (cmd.exe) totally suck, one even needs to resort to the new, and not much less sucking powershell for some halfway decent command time scripting:

Measure-Command { cmd /wait /c our.exe args }

Alien, “fun” :-/

For some time I was wondering why WoL (Wake-on-Lan) was not working on a AM2+ Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G Mini-ITX board with on-board Atheros Attansic (atl1c) that was lingering here for the usual IT testing purposes.

After quite too much time of trial’n error today I finally found out why. Turns out while the BIOS has an APM: “PME Enable” option - that is not enough! In the same power menu it additionally has a rather cryptic: “Control EuP” option that was enabled.

So how should I know what that is? Obviously not a first thought that this somehow relates to wake form standby handling. And it would certainly help if the manual for the board would somewhere prominently and easy to find linked on their product website. Alas, finally with a manual somewhere deeply hidden on their site it just says to all power settings this:

“Power
The Power Management Setup allows you to configure your system to most effectively save energy saving while operating in a manner consistent with your own style of computer use.”

Wonderful details. Anyways - enabled sounds nice, right? Well turns out that option actually disables power to various wake related components for enhanced standby power savings. Look what I found searching for the setting on the Internet in another product’s manual:

“Control EuP - Enables or disables the Energy Using Products (EuP) Ready function. When set to [Enabled], power for WOL, WO_USB, audio and onboard LEDs will be switched off at S5 state”

Ok, great. And with this disabled wake-on-lan finally works on this box, and it can go to the others into the test system rack. Yay!