Wake on WLAN

We recently deployed 31 brand spakin' new Dell Latitude E5500 laptops to a school here in town. One of the things I noticed in the BIOS settings was the option to Wake on WLAN instead of the usual Wake on LAN. Intel refers to this WoWLAN. But I can't for the life of me get it to work. If anybody searching the web for it and stumbles upon this article (sorry that I'm not offering a solution this time), please come back and post a solution in the comments if you find one.

We would like to be able to do some offline management of these laptops, and wake them up to do so in the cart on the weekend.

We have it set in the BIOS, and under the power management options in Device Manager. What I guess I can't get my head around is how a magic packet reaches a wireless card, especially one with a secured profile, while the system is off. The wireless card is a BCM4310 based Dell Wireless 1395 WLAN Mini-Card.

Any ideas? Is this Intel only?

Home Wi-Fi Security

I remember when just about every household wireless router made it difficult to add security to the connection. It wasn't part of the setup wizard, or the setup wizard didn't do a good enough job explaining why it was important.

I think we have definitely crossed a bridge in this area. Some routers (e.g. 2Wire) enable it out of the gate and put the key on the bottom of the unit (a practice we have started doing whenever we install them in a household now). Others require it as part of the setup wizard. Whatever the reason, people are finally doing it. I opened up my list of wireless networks while sitting on my couch and here's what I saw:



There were three more networks, all secured, below these that are visible. I'm glad the message finally got through. Let's just pray the ISM Band isn't toxic or something with this much Wi-Fi going around. =)