If you’ve added your Synology NAS to Home Assistant expecting a “wake up” button somewhere, you’ve probably gone looking and found nothing. That’s not a missing setting — the Synology DSM integration only manages the NAS once it’s already powered on. It has no concept of waking a sleeping or shut-down device. Wake-on-LAN (WoL) is a separate feature entirely, and it needs to be wired up on both sides: enabled on the NAS, and added to Home Assistant as its own integration.

Here’s the full setup, plus the two checks that quietly determine whether any of this actually works — checks that are easy to skip and just as easy to blame on Home Assistant when the real problem is on the NAS.

Step 1: enable WoL on the NAS itself

This is the part that’s easy to assume is already on. It isn’t, by default, on most models. On the NAS:

Control Panel → Hardware & Power → General

Check:

☑ Enable WOL on LAN 1

If your NAS has more than one LAN port, note carefully which port this enables it on — you’ll need that port’s MAC address in the next step, and the wrong one will silently do nothing.

The check that actually proves it’s working

Don’t just trust the checkbox — verify it physically. Cleanly shut down the NAS (not a power cut) and look at the back of the unit:

  • LAN port LEDs stay lit → the interface is still powered enough to listen for a magic packet. WoL is genuinely armed.
  • LEDs go fully dark → the interface is completely powered down, and no magic packet will ever reach it. Something’s wrong — recheck the setting above, and confirm you’re looking at the same port whose MAC you’re about to use.

This one physical check catches more failures than anything in the Home Assistant config does.

Step 2: find the NAS’s MAC address

You need the MAC of the specific wired LAN port you just enabled WoL on — not just any interface listed. On multi-NIC or bonded NAS models, a magic packet sent to the wrong interface’s MAC is silently ignored; there’s no error, it just never wakes up.

While the NAS is on:

  • Control Panel → Network → Network Interface, select the LAN port, view its MAC address.
  • Or from a terminal on the NAS: ip link show and match the interface to the port.

Step 3: add Wake-on-LAN to Home Assistant

Home Assistant has a built-in Wake on LAN integration — this is what actually gives you a switch/button, since the Synology integration won’t.

Settings → Devices & services → Integrations → Add Integration → search “Wake on LAN”

Or configure it directly in YAML if you prefer packages:

# packages/synology_wol.yaml
wake_on_lan:

switch:
  - platform: wake_on_lan
    name: Synology NAS
    mac: "AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF"   # the LAN 1 MAC from step 2
    host: 192.168.1.100        # optional, but see below — worth setting

Restart Home Assistant after adding this. You’ll get a switch.synology_nas entity that sends a magic packet when turned on.

Why host: is worth setting

Without host:, the switch can only ever tell you a packet was sent — it has no way to know if the NAS actually woke up. With host: set to the NAS’s IP, Home Assistant pings it to determine real state, so the switch reflects whether the NAS is actually reachable, not just whether you clicked the button.

Step 4: wait for it to actually be online before using it

Turning the switch on doesn’t mean the NAS is instantly usable — boot takes time. If you want to chain something onto a wake event (starting a backup job, checking a share is mounted, whatever), don’t just fire it immediately after the switch flips on. An automation pattern that works well:

  1. Turn on switch.synology_nas.
  2. Wait/poll until the NAS responds to ping (a wait_template on the switch’s own state, since it’s already ping-backed via host:, or a repeat-until loop with a ping command sensor).
  3. Only then trigger whatever depended on the NAS being up — a Hyper Backup run, a notification, a script.

This is the actual payoff of the whole setup: instead of manually pressing the physical power button and guessing when it’s ready, you get one switch that both wakes the NAS and tells you honestly when it’s usable.

Quick troubleshooting checklist

If the switch exists in HA but the NAS never wakes up, check in this order — it’s almost always one of these, not a Home Assistant problem:

  1. Enable WOL on LAN 1 actually checked in DSM? (Step 1)
  2. LAN port LEDs staying lit after a clean shutdown? (the physical proof from Step 1)
  3. MAC address matches the exact port WoL was enabled on, not just any NIC? (Step 2)
  4. Is the NAS on the same L2 network segment as whatever’s sending the magic packet? WoL broadcasts typically don’t cross VLANs/routers without extra config — if Home Assistant and the NAS are on different subnets, this is worth checking next.

Get through that list and a switch that reliably wakes the NAS on demand is a genuinely nice thing to have — no more walking over to press a physical button before running a backup or checking a share.