[gentoo-amd64] Wake On LAN Issue

[Richard <skitfish@gmail.com>]

Good morning all,

I have an issue with my Gentoo box but it's not Gentoo-specific, or even
software-specific for that matter, so apologies for posting here.

I have enabled wake on LAN. I've set this up in the BIOS as well as in
Gentoo: ethtool is run on each boot to enable 'wol' and I've modified
configs and scripts so that the halt command doesn't power down my
network interface.

Wake on LAN works. If I initiate a 'shutdown -h now', wait for the
machine to power off then, in the next few minutes, send a magic packet
to it, it powers back up and boots. Fine.

However, if I wait a few hours before sending the magic packet, the
machine does not power back up and the machine can only be powered back
up by pressing the power button on the machine itself. After testing
this over and over, I know as a matter of fact that the only thing that
causes the magic packet to fail to power the machine back up is time; if
I leave it too long between powering the machine off and sending the
magic packet.

Has anyone else here experienced this?

Thank you in advance,
Richard