Want to be able to start your computer @home while you’re somewhere else?
The answer might be as simple as 3 letters: WOL (Wake On Lan)
In short – WOL sends a “magic packet” to the host you want to wake up.
All you need is a motherboard which support WOL, a network card with similar support, and an OS able to enable this feature.
Ofc. you also need a computer/router to send magic packet (and know the MAC address of the receiving NIC) 😉
Waking op a Linux system
Enabling wol on a Linux host is quite easy – if your hardware is set up for WOL (often a BIOS setting). Check the manual of your board 🙂
Install ethtool (‘apt-get install ethtool’ on debian/ubuntu).
enable WOL on eth0
ethtool -s eth0 wol g
This has to be done every time your computer shuts down, so you might want to make a script for it like this
make a script (call it wol.sh ? in /etc/init.d)
#!/bin/bash
ethtool -s eth0 wol g
make it executionable and enable it to run from init
# chmod +x wol.sh
# update-rc.d -f wol.sh defaults
Waking op a Mac OS X system
Enable the system to wake up is easy – found this blog showing just how easy:
– go into system preferences, energy saver, and enable “Wake for Ethernet network administrator access”.
some posts I’ve seen says OS X will wake up every couple of hours to let the network know it’s still there – but I’ll take care of that if I ever use OS X that much.
Sending the magic packet
I haven’t tested that much until now – just using my m0n0wall for this … got a nice webinterface where you can list your WOL hosts, and just click them when you need them to wake up