I did a bit of searching around, and it's possible that I didn't understand what I was reading, but I didn't see anything all that relevant.
At work, we've just been asked to shut down our desktops each evening to save power. This is all very well, but I use my machine remotely fairly often and would like to be able to access it when I need it.
To this end, I've been attempting to understand Wake-On-LAN, which seems like it would allow me to wake up the machine, make my changes, then shut it down again or something.
However, most of the information I'm finding on the web expects the user to be trying to access the machine from the Internet, and hence requires port forwarding on the router. But I (hopefully) don't need that: we have a VPN, and I can remote to one of our servers from outside, so I can be "within" the network. I was hoping to not have to tweak the router's configuration.
What I was hoping was to be able to send the magic packet from one of the servers directly to my desktop so it boots, and then once it's up I can jump out and access my machine as a separate task. Is there a program where, if you give it a machine's MAC address, it will send that machine a magic packet within the network, so that it boots up? Ideally with a minimum of configuration?
Basically, I'd like to tell the guys in the office, "Hey, if you really need your desktop and it's currently off, enter your MAC address here and your computer should boot up."
Is this possible? Does it exist? Am I missing something fundamental about the entire protocol?
Best Answer
Sure it is possible, if you are inside your network you just need to send the Magic Packet directly to the computer's MAC address with some program like Wake-on-LAN GUI (for Windows) or wol (for unixes, there are others) from one of your servers.