Anyone know a wake on LAN/WAN utility which uses IP instead of/as well as MAC address? Better yet maybe a good ethernet router which has it built in. Would need to have firewall and VPN passthrough too though.
I have found a couple of little utilities that do this.. Firstly there is the aptly named WakeOnLAN which also includes a cool dashboard widget http://www.readpixel.com/wakeonlan and there is an older one floating around called Wake550, however this uses hardware addresses (or at least it did when i last looked). For those who are interested here is the URL. Fianlly there is also a nice little perl script that you could easily implement in a project of some sort. http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/jpo/software/wakeonlan/
because wake on lan uses a broadcast message within a single collision domain (ie one local un-routed network) and it works at layer 2 of the OSI network model. What this means is that you can't route a magic packet across routers because broacast messages shouldn't be routed. Their are ways of getting around this by opening ports in your router and sending wac on lan like packets to an IP address and having your router forward it to your computer behind the firewall. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050526140449513&query=wake%2Bon%2Blan
Some good points Burtman... I didn't even think of that while i was racking my brain for software to do this :-)
Waragainstsleep, have you tried setting up port forwarding on your router? I am not familliar with the Netgear stuff... I use a D-Link one at home. Try Netgears website.. should tell you how to do port forwarding (this is also sometimes know as Virtual Servers).
I have a port open for the magic packets, it still doesn't seem to work. I have ports for FTP, AFP, SMB, ARD and probably others which all work fine. So it can't be the router, I've triple checked the settings. Just can't seem to make it work.
another way I've got round this problem before is to have something always on at home (I used to have a router running OpenWRT linux) that you can ssh to and then send the magic packet to your main box from inside your network. Also worth noting is that if you have your Mac in sleep mode and you have security options turned on to prompt you for your password on resume, if you don't log onto the console interactively (at the gui) then your Mac goes back to sleep after about a minuter. Their is a way of killing the process running the screen lock, can't remember it of the top of my head, involves somthing like: kill -9 <password prompt program>
(on a completely unrelated note, the scrolling Marque button on the compose message icon on the new site is driving me nuts!)
Hmm. I was kinda hoping that I could do this with my existing kit. What sort of routers run *NIX variants then? (I know its probably most of them, but one I can mod to run extra software).