Windows 7 Pro Computer won’t wake on LAN via Magic Packet from outside network

64-bitmagic-packetremote desktopwake-on-lanwindows 7

I just purchased a new computer running Windows 7 Professional x64. I'd like to save power by having it sleep after an hour, but I would also like to be able to Remote Desktop into it at my leisure.

I set up a static IP and have port forwarding set up on the router. If the computer is awake, the RDP connection works just fine.

I downloaded and installed Wake-On-LAN thanks to this article

If I put my new computer to sleep and send the magic packet from my old computer inside of my home network it wakes up. If I do the same thing, however, from my work computer outside the network it does not.

I figured the Firewall was blocking the incoming traffic, but nothing in the Windows Firewall logs points to this happening.

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions or any tests I can run through in order to narrow down what the problem might be.

Best Answer

I had a similar problem as yours, and I used a webpage on my server to send the magic packet.

I used the code and WolAsp.dll from Depicus:

Wake On Lan for Active Server Pages allows any IIS web browser with the ASP interpreter to send a Magic Packet to a remote machine

From their FAQ page:

Wake on Lan over the Internet (or why is it such a pain in the ****)

"IP directed broadcasts are used in the extremely common and popular "smurf" denial of service attack, and can also be used in related attacks.

An IP directed broadcast is a datagram which is sent to the broadcast address of a subnet to which the sending machine is not directly attached. The directed broadcast is routed through the network as a unicast packet until it arrives at the target subnet, where it is converted into a link-layer broadcast. Because of the nature of the IP addressing architecture, only the last router in the chain, the one that is connected directly to the target subnet, can conclusively identify a directed broadcast. Directed broadcasts are occasionally used for legitimate purposes, but such use is not common outside the financial services industry.

In a "smurf" attack, the attacker sends ICMP echo requests from a falsified source address to a directed broadcast address, causing all the hosts on the target subnet to send replies to the falsified source. By sending a continuous stream of such requests, the attacker can create a much larger stream of replies, which can completely inundate the host whose address is being falsified.

If a Cisco interface is configured with the no ip directed-broadcast command, directed broadcasts that would otherwise be "exploded" into link-layer broadcasts at that interface are dropped instead. Note that this means that no ip directed-broadcast must be configured on every interface of every router that might be connected to a target subnet; it is not sufficient to configure only firewall routers. The no ip directed-broadcast command is the default in Cisco IOS software version 12.0 and later. In earlier versions, the command should be applied to every LAN interface that isn't known to forward legitimate directed broadcasts."

Quoted from Cisco.

I wonder if somewhere along the line, the packet's being blocked. You can try Depicus' WoL on the Internet page and see if the packet will reach your computer.

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