On Linux, is root privilege required to send a wake-on-lan magic packet?

Question

On Linux, is root privilege required to send a wake-on-lan magic packet?

If it depends on how you send the magic packet, please let me know under what situation root is required.

Answer 1

It depends on the program you use to send wake-on-lan packets. Some programs use raw packets, and therefore require root. Other programs embed the magic wakeup sequence in a bog standard UDP packet, and thus do not require root.

In theory it shouldn't matter what kind of packet you use, as long as there's the magic wake-on-lan sequence somewhere inside it. In practice I seem to remember that my old desktop refused to wake up when I used a Python script that sent UDP packets, but worked fine if I used a C program that used raw packets.