On my PCs I don't have the 'Wake from shutdown' in the advanced list so I always just tick the relevant options in the 'Power Management' tab.

I generally also tick the 'Only allow management stations to wake the computer' otherwise the PC will periodically wake itself up to refresh network settings etc. With this option ticked the only time it will wake up is due to a scheduled wakeup, e.g. to record a TV show, or to run my scheduled backup or when sent a magic wake up packet.

I spent the 2 hours a while ago actually looking up the spec on Wake On Lan (WOL) and writing my own equivalent of mc-wol ;-)

Cheers

Hey,
Do you think this might work in the following situation:
When I need to use my home pc for VNC example, I'm not comfortable with putting it on all day. The only thing that's active all day is the router. Would it be possible to get the router to send such packet ?

It does look like you can wake up over the internet.

Here's a web page that will generate the Wake-on-LAN "magic packet":

https://www.dslreports.com/wakeup

You provide the MAC address of the target computer and your internet IP. But before you do..

Looks like most implementations send the "magic packet" via UDP over either port 7 or port 9 according to the Wikipedia entry (the page above specifically says it uses port 9). So you'll have to make sure that port is forwarded by your firewall/router to the IP broadcast address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_address

Remember, you can't send the packet to a specific IP because a computer in sleep mode or powered off has no IP address.

Good post. I found out about this the other week when I noticed that when my eMac would go to sleep, I could no longer print to it. It's a pain that it doesn't wake automatically and therefore allow me to save power by being asleep when I'm not using it. Very handy at least to be able to wake up a machine.

Yeah, I experience a whole host of problems when my MacBook Pro goes to sleep. And it's also nice to see a fellow Toejam & Earl geek out there.

Excellent... I love that last comment about spending hours figuring it out rather than walk across the room :)

There have been times when I've been on-site and wished I could have remoted to my desktop at home (which was asleep at the time).

This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say that I've been reading this site for a while and really enjoy it. One thing that especially strikes me is that even though the people here are programmers, they also know the hardware tools of their trade (i.e., their computers and how to manage them). This article is a perfect example of that. The reason I mention it is that my son is currently in the process of getting a Computer Science degree. He's finishing his third year. Yet, the school spends no effort trying to educate the students on the ins and outs of the various forms of PCs/Operating Systems out there. Oh, I think he's got an OS class coming up next year. But, there's nothing where they lock the students in a room with a pile of parts and some CDs and tell them they can't get out until they build a PC, load the OS, and install a development environment (I guess that would be considered "training" instead of "education," so it's pooh-poohed). I keep telling him he's got to pick this kind of stuff up on his own, but he's young and doesn't understand yet. Anyway, I just wanted to say it's refreshing to see all this knowledge here.

Hi

Weird -I have the opposite problem. There have been many occasions when I have been asleep and my PC has needed me to be awake. Sadly, although it knows that there is a magic packet that would wake me, it does not have the ability to make a coffee and roll me a fag, so it's cries for me to wake me go unheeded

For a while I had a cheap webcam hooked up and software that detected if the overhead light was on. When the light went off, it immediately put my computer into standby mode, and when the light was on, it woke up. Obviously not a solution for remote wakeup, but cute nonetheless.

Thank you! I was trying this myself last week. Tried all the same steps, but stopped just short of the property pages and "bingo!"

Thank you for abetting my laziness.

I once had a PC that just wouldn't stay off. I would shut it down when I was finished using it and then come back hours later to find it up and running. Turns out that the bios was set to wake up on serial port events, and my external modem was generating them whenever the phone rang. What a silly set of features that was! The modem wasn't going to auto-answer, and there's basically no chance that the phone would still be ringing by the time the PC finished booting.

To David A. Lessnau: They didn't teach that stuff when I was school either. I learned it because of an unhealthy obsession with computers starting at an early age. (And I suspect that's a pretty universal experience.)

Here is some code on how to do it.
If anyone wants to add this to there app...
https://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2006/04/02/3858.aspx

Oh, and another thing I found out:

Most home routers will NOT route requests to the IP broadcast address (eg, 192.168.0.255, or 192.168.255.255). This makes it effectively impossible to wake up your PC over the internet using a WOL packet. :(

There is a workaround for routers that run linux, a manual iptables edit:
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13287946

Er, holy cow. I take that back. I got it to work; I was able to wake up the PC using a magic packet sent over the internet.

I followed the instructions here for my router (a D-Link DGS-4300):
https://members.home.nl/rboerdijk/docs/wol.htm

And I used the "Wake-on-WAN" page here to send the magic packet:
https://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/woli.aspx

The .NET code behind this page is available, too:
https://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/woli-code.zip

So now I can wake up any PC on my network from anywhere I have access to the internet (well, assuming I keep a list of the MAC addresses with me). Really cool stuff.

Want to wake from your router? Scrap the firmware that came with your router and upgrade to dd-wrt. https://dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/index.php Along with unlocking 'hidden' features on your router, you can wake up any attached devices. Really handy when you're a couple hundred miles away.

Red writes: "There have been many occasions when I have been asleep and my PC has needed me to be awake. Sadly, although it knows that there is a magic packet that would wake me, it does not have the ability to make a coffee and roll me a fag, so it's cries for me to wake me go unheeded"

With a little hardware hacking, it can. There is an example in the front of one of the Java books on controlling a coffee pot via X-10. There are plenty of interfaces for X-10-style home automation available. Making a rolling/stuffing robot shouldn't be all that difficult - a little MindStorms action, anyone?

Once I wrestled with wake-on LAN over the internet for exactly the reasons mentioned here : VNC server running but didn't want to have power-on all day. However, the problem was that my pc was waking up every couple of seconds. I never investigated further, but my best guess is that it was the router trying to communicate with the pc for some reason, and then inadvertently waking it up.

I had the problem of my Netgear router not allowing the broadcast on 192.168.0.255. Solution: change the subnet of your local network to 255.255.255.128, and then the broadcast IP becomes 192.168.0.127. Obviously, this reduces the number of available IPs on the subnet by half, but this should not be a problem for a home network.

I use to wake up my home pc from school or work all the time. Fortunately the router has a built in WoL option so no tools are needed.

The difference between selecting the option to "wake from shutdown" and "allow this device to wake the computer" is quite simple after you figure it out. For several times. Until it sticks in your head. The first allows to wake up on lan from a shut down computer while the second allows the same with a computer in stand by. If you only select the first you will be able to wake the stopped computer but if you leave it idle and it enters stand by that's it. It's very weird until you get it.

There are some options that need to be enabled in Bios for WoL to work. It depends on what kind of lan card you use. Usually you go to power management stuff and select things like "allow PCIE device to wake the computer" and other. I use the build in card on my motherboard that is connected on PCIE so I need that selected.

I don't understand why those checkboxes make a difference. Shouldn't this be an OS-independent feature?

I am running Linux on my PC, and I am trying to achieve the same result. When the computer is turned off, I see that the LED of the NIC shows some activity..

Hmmm, isn't there something else that should be taken into account?

Maybe it`s worth it...
2 hours is 7200 seconds, if the 20 feet takes you 15 seconds to walk for the round-trip. After only 480 uses you get your investment back and start getting some profit.

Internet packets? A balled up sock will do the trick if you aim for the keyboard/mouse. Try deflecting it off the screen, if possible. If that doesn't work, and you still have a crappy CRT, go ahead and throw the shoe. If your lucky, you'll bust your monitor and have a reason to upgrade to the 21" flat screen instead of starting that college fund for your kids.

As far as I know there are two things going on.

1) you can wake a machine by using the IP address that the router has for it on file w/o sending a magic packet.

2) if you check the "only allow management stations" checkbox, the PC will only respond to a magic packet.

#2 is always going to be more reliable because you are using the MAC address. But #1 will wake the PC simply by attempting to access it from your local network.

If you're going to say "remotely waking up your *PC*," why don't you incorporate how to do so on all operating systems that run on PCs (or at least the more popular alternatives to Microsoft Windows)?

In fact, I've noticed quite a few times that your posts are very Microsoft Windows oriented.

Nonetheless, it is still your blog and you may do as you wish, but I think it's also appropriate to appreciate non-Windows operating systems.

Tangentially, why is it that your CAPTCHAs are always "orange" (or at least appear to always be that to me)?

I've tried to get wake on lan to work for my office computer, but only with limited success. The computer seems to wake up... disk starts activity and the monitor activates although nothing displays and I'm able to access files on the remote machine, but the pain is that attempting to Remote Desktop to the recently woken machine fails. The initial log-in screen appears, but as soon as the password is entered, Remote Desktop promptly closes. Worse, attempting to do this seems to completely lock up the computer so that no amount of banging on its keyboard will allow it to respond. File sharing ceases to function and even the power button no longer works. At that point, I can only unplug it and start over.

I've tried to get wake on lan to work for my office computer, but only with limited success. The computer seems to wake up... disk starts activity and the monitor activates although nothing displays and I'm able to access files on the remote machine, but the pain is that attempting to Remote Desktop to the recently woken machine fails. The initial log-in screen appears, but as soon as the password is entered, Remote Desktop promptly closes. Worse, attempting to do this seems to completely lock up the computer so that no amount of banging on its keyboard will allow it to respond. File sharing ceases to function and even the power button no longer works. At that point, I can only unplug it and start over.

This poster from microsoft.public.windowsxp.general seems to have the same problem:

https://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general/browse_frm/thread/793b1dd00745a352/82f4a808325be335?lnk=st&q=remote+desktop+wake+on+lan+does+not+work&rnum=1&hl=en#82f4a808325be335

Hi,

I've posted how to wake computers using only Powershell and .Net Framwork on my personal blog:

https://viniciuscanto.blogspot.com/2007/01/wake-on-lan-powershell-acordando.html

I used a class to form and send udp packets. It's simple, and you don't need anymore mc-wol program.

Thank you and congratulations!

--
Vinicius Canto < scripterbr_at_gmail_dot_com >
MVP Visual Developer - Scripting
MCP Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP e SQL Server 2000
Blog sobre Scripting: https://viniciuscanto.blogspot.com

Too bad that my home network is wireless. I have to stand up and walk this several steps to wake up my pc physically. It's a shame that wake on wireless is still so rarely supported.

"why get out of your chair and walk 20 feet when you can spend two hours figuring out how to do it without moving at all?"
So true, brother, so true.

I use my DD-WRT enabled router to wake up computers -- it works great.

Mafro stated that you can get NetGear routers that don't support WoL out-of-the-box to do it by changing the SubNet mask to 255.255.255.128 and then using the broadcast address 192.168.0.127.

I've done this and whilst the router (DG834DG) doesn't now complain about an invalid IP address (as it does if you enter 192.168.0.255) the WoL packet doesn't even get registered in the router's log. Changing the forwarding IP to 192.168.0.4 (for example) is recorded in the log as a rule match but doesn't turn the PC on because it is off and has no IP - the network needs to have the broadcast packet, correctly 192.168.0.127 but the NetGear router doesn't seem to forward this as Mafro suggests.

If Mafro reads this, can you enlighten me how you got it working? If not, anyone else using a NetGear router got it to work without using the "patched" firmware?

Thanks.

Hi guys,

I'm trying for over a week to make WOL to work on a linux box, several thousand miles away :) . I have made the necessary modifications to the BIOS and I've enabled WOL support in the PC's network card. The problem is that the router through which the PC is connected is behaving strangely...

Whenever I try to wake the PC over the internet, I succeed once every 10 or 20 tries. I am using the IP that it is reported by pinging the dns name of the PC (I'm using DynDNS). Although the PC is off, the IP that it is recorded in the DynDNS database *should* be the IP assigned to the router, right? Am I missing something?

The reason I believe that the router is the major cause of the problem is that whenever I ping my machine, when the machine is off, ping fails. Again I would expect the router to respond back... I should also mention that the hardware firewall inside the router is off. Unfortunately I don't remember the router's brand or model.

Could it be that the IP I'm using doesn't correspond to the IP of the router? The strange thing is that I access the PC remotely, I shut it down and right after I try to wake it up again (before the ISP assignes a new IP -- I have a DSL connection), and the PC might or might not boot, depending on its mood :) .

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance

hey guys,

i have succeeded in turning on my computer through lan network, but over the internet it still does now work. I have been using a monitor to see if the magic packets are sent in over the internet, and they are. Once I turn off my computer, and send the packets through the internet, i could see the ethernet cable lights on my network card blink as soon as i send it. From what I can see, the correct packets are getting sent, but the computer isn't turning on for some reason. Please help out! thanks in advance

I need to do exactly what Chris is talking about above- waking up a computer when the lights come on (and putting it to sleep when they go off would be great too). How could I get this set up and what sofware would be needed? THANKS!! :)

Katie, I don't know if you'll ever see this, but there is one option that might work for you. Some motherboards (I have no idea how many) have an option in BIOS for how the computer is to react to a power failure, called (on my machine) "AC BACK Function". This has three options: Soft-Off, Full-On and Memory. What might work for you is the Full-On function combined with hooking the computer to the same power source as the lights. When you turn on the lights, the computer recieves current and it starts. Downside is of course that it will lose power as soon as the lights are turned off, but that maybe can be worked around.

Not sure if this is an at all reasonable solution, but I just thought...

Hi Jeff Atwood,

Your explanation is cool. But how does it work with wireless access through wireless router?

Thanks
Sovath

Check out Auto WOL using DD-WRT at

https://gaddgets.blogspot.com/

If you are web hosting and want your PC/Mac to sleep when there is no traffic. Obviously not for mission critical web hosting ...

Johan, Thanks for the thought. The main issue is that my professor wants his computer to wake up quickly when he comes back to his office. I was hoping that we could do this through motion detection or light sensing, but I haven't found a great way to do this yet. If you have the right product, I'm sure our lab is willing to pay for it. I'm a mech. engineer, not computer engr, so I'm really lost!

Hey, I have a problem. I have a media center setup in my home. Have it setup so I can turn it on from being powered off by wol. Problem is that if I turn on a light or the AC it boots my media center on. How can I prevent this from happening. I have a wol cable hooked up to my mobo and I think my bios settings are correct. So, any help would be nice or point me in a direction with ppl that have similar problems.

Thanks again for your help in advance,
Sincerely,
bitor
email: s1pamstuff@hotmail.com

Update to the above post....

Hey, I have a problem. I have a media center setup in my home. Have it setup so I can turn it on or off by wor(wake on ring). Problem is that if I turn on a light switch for the fan it boots my media center on. How can I prevent this from happening. I have a WOR cable hooked up to my mobo and I think my bios settings are correct. So, any help would be nice or point me in a direction with ppl that have similar problems.

Thanks again for your help in advance,
Sincerely,
bitor
email: s1pamstuff@hotmail.com

I'm not sure why you guys are having all these problems. i have an emachines AMD 3000+ - with this feature. If i'm downloading 3 gig from a newserver, once its done, it goes to sleep after 3 minutes. Then when I try to remote desktop into it, I have no problems. It wakes up,and I can remote to it without a problem.

Maybe i have different settings?

I made 2 batch files using poweroff3.0 by Jorgen Bosman and Wizmo By Steve Gibson for the following purpose

1.mute and turnoff the monitor -mute with wizmo, turnoff with poweroff
2.unmute and power on monitor - unmute with wizmo, turn on with poweroff

the code for the two batch files is

-----------------------batch file#1--------------------------
:: monoffmute.bat
:: turn off monitor and mutes sound
::
@ECHO OFF

C:\poweroff monitor_off
C:\wizmo mute=1
-----------------------batch file #2-------------------------
::mononsoundon.bat
:: turn on monitor and un-mutes sound
::
@ECHO OFF

C:\poweroff monitor_on
C:\wizmo mute=0

---------------------------------------------------
I then assigned 2 separate keys on my Pinnacle TV tuner (PCTV plus 110i) for running both above batch files.
My problem is that the monitor turns off from the remote(and green light turns to amber on monitor), but turns back on because TV/VIDEO/MUSIC app is playing.any activity on the screen turns on the monitor.So the trick doesn't work as I envisaged.I want the monitor to stay turned off no matter what it is playing.It should turn on only when i press the button that i programmed to do so! :(

How do I achieve that?

Thanks a lot for your time
Neelesh Bhagwat
If you have a suggestion please post or mail me on bhagwatnp2@gmail.com

Hey folks! Some of the posts here have helped me a ton but at this point I am still stuck. I have a server I need to wake remotely via the internet. I have been able to wake it over my local intranet (LAN) but can not for the life of me get it to wake over the internet (WAN). If anyone knows how to get this to work I would greatly appreciate it. I am not sure if I am setting up my router correctly so that might be the problem. Also in an earlier post I can't input 192.168.0.255. The max it will allow is 244.

Here is my setup.

Router: D-Link DI-624
Provider IP: Static 68.109.73.xxx
Provider Subnet: 255.255.248.0
LAN: DHCP 192.168.0.xxx
Lan Subnet: 255.255.255.0
NIC Card: Wired

** Also I figured out how to wake a wireless pc. You can do this by installing a wireless gaming adapter instead of a wireless card. The adapter plugs into a standard NIC card port(wired). The reason wireless cards won't wake is because they have no power to receive the signals. The external adapters have seperate power supplies and therefore are able to continue the signal through to the PC. I am currently using the D-Link DWL-G820. It's wireless G 108mbps. In a sense your using 2 NICs to solve one problem but with most boards having a built in NIC port it's no different than adding in a seperate wireless card.

I enabled the "allow this device to wake the PC from standby" checkbox, and also made sure the "wake from poweroff" option was selected in the network card advanced properties.

I hibernated the PC, and then ran mc-wol. The PC woke up as expected.

I then hibernated the PC again, and ran mc-wol.. but this time he PC didn't wake up.

I started the PC Up again, rebooted, and then hibernated, and this time it woke up... but after hibernating a 2nd time, it wouldn't work again....

Anyone have any ideas why my PC will only wake up once?

I have an Abit AN7 motherboard with onboard nvidia network card.

Thanks.

How about easy way? Access your PC power button through your browser:

https://ool-43537bf6.dyn.optonline.net/Power%20Web%20Button.htm

regarding post made by Steve Bush and others Feb 13 where WOL
does not fully awaken computer so that remote desktop cannot
logon and crashes the remote system,

I have fixed this possibly as follows:

The culprit is the add-on pci or pcie video card. If you use the onboard video no problem, but if you disable any onboard video thru the bios settings and use an add-on video card expansion slot (I am using geforce 8600 gts on an intel G33 express chipset under windows xp pro sp2, the motherboard has onboard video which I disabled) then you have this problem. The WOL command does not wake the video card fully although everything else is alive. This will crash windows remote desktop and as a protection may even freeze the system.

I updated my bios to latest and under video section I changed the setting from disable onboard to AUTO. This allows the WOL to poll the video on the MBO. I am not sure of solution if this option is not in your bios, but it does work so far. Otherwise, resort to onboard video.

Great blog! I love the honesty and humor mixed with the solutions. I found this while searching for a solution to my Wake on Lan problem. Like many others, I can wake my computer from another computer on my home network (wired), but when I try to wake it over the net, the Apple Airport Extreme Base station stops the incoming magic packet? I called Apple and their tech didn't know what I was even talking about. I am trying to wake up a win xp pro computer on my wired home network (using apple router and netgear 8 port gigabit switch) from over the net. I tried the discus site and a couple of others. I put in the mac address, the external ip, and the subnet just like on the lan, but it won't get thru the apple router. Anybody have any ideas?
-blue
p.s. Or can anybody recommend a router (wired & wireless) that WILL allow me to do this?

I can accomplish remote wakeup over the internet using the dslreports.com site. I use RealVNC to work on the computer remotely. After I wake the computer remotely I can't access it through VNC. When I boot it up physically VNC works like a charm. VNC is running in service mode by the way.

Any ideas?

I have the same problem, i want to wake my computer at home, and it is behind an airport extreme router. I can wake it from inside my lan, but not from outside, even though I have made a port mapping of port 9. I think the airport extreme does not have this ability. Unfortunately. It stops the magic packet for security reasons. I found an explanation in an article called "don't let sleeping Macs lie". Google and read more.

Advertisement:
All routers from German manufacturer LANCOM Systems GmbH (www.lancom.de) have WOL support with current firmware. They can be instructed to generate the magic packet with MAC, IP and/or port target. They can route (or broadcast) any or specific packets as desired from WAN (inverse masquerading). With extended firewall included you are able to achieve this without loss in security, too.

Private:
Thanks for the amusing thread while solving the same problem with my office PC for home access.

BTW.: I'm using an ASUS P5LD2-SE with Realtek RTL8168B on board and the LEDs are NOT lit while the NIC wakes up fine on the magic packet. I wasted hours trying to bring them alight in PCs off state, till i recogniced the PC wakes up on network traffic without this obvious signal of power supply.
AND: You always have to shutdown by OS. If you do not e.g. by holding the power button for 5 seconds, the ATX power supply reacts directly and will switch off even those 5V DC necessary for the NIC to recognice and react on WOL packets... Same is true for external power switch.

scheduled internet-based wake-on-line over internet - <a href="https://www.rshut.com/products/wol">https://www.rshut.com/products/wol</a>;

I want code to make an HTML version of WOL so I can wake PCs from my phone. Can't figure it out yet.

Thanks for the article! I discovered it worked best by disabling "Wake from shutdown" in the Advanced properties, and enabling "Allow to wake" in Power Management.

Good write up Jeff. I've been looking into a similar issue and found that KB815304 has to be installed on XP SP2 machines to allow RDP to wake up a machine from Standby. XP SP3 machines worked fine but KB8151304 is part of SP3.

Does anyone know if I'll be able to do this from a squeezebox to my pc over a wireless network?

Ideally the computer in my loft can be left on sleep when not being used but if I fire up a squeezebox this will kick it back into life.

Any advice for a relative novice to this area would be brilliant.

Cheers