Feature Requests

I'd like to see an option of having the Monowall automatically send WOL packets to specified MACs to recover from a power loss.  Say 90-120 seconds after successfully booting and becoming "stable", have the monowall start sending WOL packets to turn on the servers under it.  I'd also like to see options like this:

1. Time from boot to "stable" until first WOL (default: 90 seconds)
2. list of MACs to receive WOL packets
3. Time between WOL packets (to spread initial electrical load over time to prevent blowing breakers) (default: 60 seconds)

All the servers we manage have power on after power restored set to enabled in their BIOS.

we sometimes don't have stable power when the utility company is bringing up power after a loss... sometime it can come back up for just moments, then go down again, then back up again.  Machines that have actual hard discs seem to suffer the hardest, I've had both HD failures and RAID battery-backup data corruption/loss.  The Mono is installed solid state  and it could turn it on and off repeatedly with much less chance of damage.  Everything is behind either surge protection or small UPS, but we don't have a budget for a large VA UPS unit nor one that controls/supports delayed power up of attached devices.

One thing you might consider is this approach.

It only takes one line of shell code to send a WOL magic packet.

You would bring up your first server automatically upon restoration of power via BIOS settings.

Then, once booted, a shell script in its rc (or init) would send a WOL magic packet to one of the other servers.

The next  server, once running could send a WOL magic packet to another server, and so on.

You get the delayed startup sequence you are looking for, and it doesn't depend on the firewall, only the servers themselves.

True, all the parameters are not all stored in one place, but it's essentially a free solution.

The thing about feature requests is that everybody wants something, and a lot of what is wanted isn't exactly firewall related. Something more easily extensible such as pfsense seems to be where most are pointed to since the end user can more easily get inside it without rebuilding the whole image.

But.....one can always hope.

thought about this... would work for stand alone servers, but not work for embedded systems like Monowall, Freenas, Askozia, etc... you can't add scripts/batch files to their boot sequence

BUT, I might be able to make it work with a single ("3rd tier") server waking every embedded machine at once