Do you think I didn’t read this? You obviously saw that I posted it in another comment, and I am mentioning info from the very text you posted here.

(Edit: I am realizing I am coming across as kinda hostile here, but I genuinely just want to understand your thought process behind posting this)

If you read the comments of the answer you copied, the OP of the question also said the following:

The following solutions worked: Static ARP entries and subnet-directed broadcasts. You may use one of both if you have the same scenario. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Them mentioning that one ‘may use one of both’ makes me believe there is a way to make this work properly with unicast. The serverfault post is also mentioning the need to manage several machines this way, which is why I believe the answer you copied suggested using broadcast, as managing ARP entries for several machines could become tedious and unreliable.

Yes, electricity is expensive here and I don’t use it daily.

Yup. And it works already, as long as the server was shut down in the last few hours. Then it stops working. The 4 hours mentioned here seem about right.

Because I want the server to boot when a service on said server is being accessed. Without having to manually boot it before.

I’ll look into my options regarding a different switch or router, thanks.

However your solution with the ESP32 would require me to manually trigger the boot, no? At that point I can just use the magic packet, which works fine already.

I am talking about WoL in unicast mode, not with the magic packet.

Rent?