Wake on lan over the internet

If your NIC supports it, you can set it up to wake up from ANY packets directed to it.

eg. Setup port forwarding on port 12345 to your computer. Then "telnet <External IP> 12345 " from another computer and the TCP request to open that port will wake your computer up.

Again, your NIC has to support this and not just the "Magic Packet".

Another thing is you would have a dedicated computer inside your network that you can remote onto and you can make that computer send off a "Magic" packet to your computer to wake it up.

At my last job, we had a central computer that did our WOL and we could send out magic packets to computers by name. This one computer HAD to be on all vLANs because the packet is non-routable, so it had to originate on the local vLAN.

99% of the reason for routers is to break up broadcast domains. The magic packet is a broadcast frame.

Don't forget, if you ever have a power-outage or un-plug your computer for any reason, you will more than likely have to boot to the OS and shutdown again before WOL will work.

WOL gets initialized by the OS when the Os tells your NIC which IP to look for. Since the magic packet is a broadcast frame, it does NOT contain the MAC address of your NIC, which means your NIC has to watch for packets that contain it's IP address. It can't know it's IP until the OS assigns it. Unless you have a custom setup or the NIC supports it some other way.

Warning:
I use to have my NIC setup to wake from any packets and not just the Magic packet. My wife's computer, which runs Vista, like to periodically probe the network and update file shares. Well, she has a file share on my computer. This meant when she went to explorer, her computer would send out a request to my machine via SMB, which meant my computer would wake up. Typically, my computer would wake up within an hour of shutting down.

Kind of defeated the purpose to even shutting my computer down.

www.logmein.com Free Version

You may have Googled LMI but I have it installed and I can "Switch on this computer" from the Internet.

I'm curious how you have it setup. From what I've read, there are a few ways to setup LMI to do WOL. Do you have only one computer on the network then you forwarded a port and have it wake on any packet?

I'm not saying that your setup doesn't work, because obviously you say it is. I'm just interested in how it's setup. I've done my fair share of Network Security, Network Admin, Network Engineering & Design, and Server Administration classes on top of debugging & setting up vLANs and routers to work with WOL for actual work/real world LANs(not class related).

I decided to double check myself with Wikipedia as a reference to make sure I wasn't out of date with my WOL knownledge since I last worked with them a few years back.

Wikipeida:

You'll notice that Wikipedia says the exact same thing I said above.

#1a. The WOL packet MUST originate on the local switch as the packet is NOT rout-able over the internet.
#1b. One exception to routing is if you have direct access to ALL of the routers between the source machine and the destination you can allow the routers to pass the WOL packet, but is otherwise by default off and nost major router/ISP will forward.
#2. You can use VPN access to make the packet look like it originated on the local network, but you still need to setup a VPN.
#3. Access to another machine on the local network. If you can access another machine locally, you can have that machine drop the packet on the LAN.

These are the 3 main points I originally made, but I didn't read Wikipedia to make my original statement, I just used my current knowledge of how WOL/Routers work.

Again, I'm not saying you're "wrong", I'm just saying all of my understanding and experience says only the above 3 cases will work reliably.

In a nutshell. In order for WOL to work, your NIC MUST support it. The WOL standard states that the packet is a broadcast frame. Broadcast frames are NOT routed on the internet as "real" routers ONLY do layer 3 while broadcast frames ONLY operate at layer 2.

In order to get around this, your NIC would have to support a non-standard WOL setup which requires drivers/firmware from the manufacturer to implement. In my case, Intel has an option on my NIC to wake from ANY packets directed to my machine. This is not standard and actually sucks since Windows SMB likes to connect/refresh shares a lot.

When doing WOL over the internet, does it work if all of your computers(with LMI installed) are currently turned off?

I'm wondering if LMI recognizes that all your computers are on the same LAN and has one of the running computers send out the WOL packet.



Anyway, it doesn't hurt to try out LMI since it's free. If it work, it works, even if I may not understand it. I still think it's falling into one of those above cases since it's obviously working for Grumpy.

Being that Grumpy is very sure of himself, I was convinced that there must be a possible way to use WOL w/o having a computer on.

I did find a site that explained a possible process. Add port forwarding to your Router. Pick a port. Set this port to forward to *.255 for the IP (eg 192.168.1.255).

According to this site, even consumer grade switches *should* translate the 255 IP to a broadcast packet. This of course would result in a standard WOL packet no matter which port it came on.

I haven't played with Wireshark(Ethreal) in a while and I'm not sure how standard translating *.255 into broadcasts is as I have never had luck on an non-Layer3 switches with this. But then again, they're probably using a low-end/Older version of L3 switch chips in consumer grade switches now-a-days anyway. Like I said, I have not tested this as of recent so it could work.

Netgear's own 3700 forumn says their router does NOT support port forwarding to a broadcast address and thusly break our idea for using that to make a valid WoL packet.

I guess you'll have to wait until OpenWRT or DD-WRT has a stable release for the 3700.

Ok i got wake on wan to work....by using dd-wrt on wndr3700 router
set up wol in the firmware....

Enable WOL on the Computer

1. On the LAN adapter of the computer (physical ethernet adapter, WOL does not work over wireless connections!), choose Properties/Configure.
2. Power Management tab (far right). Check the second and third boxes to enable WOL. Press OK until you are back at Network Connections. Now the computer can normally be started from Hibernate, Standby, or PowerOff modes via a special management packet.
3. Get ready to test your set-up by using a utility like WOL Magic Packet Sender http://magicpacket.free.fr/ (free). Install it on both the computer you are using and a second PC on the same physical LAN.
4. On the WOL computer, open WOL Magic Packet and on the Receive tab, click the green Start button.
5. On the second computer, open WOL Magic Packet and on the Send tab, put in:
1. IP Address of WOL computer for Host Name
2. 0.0.0.0 for Subnet Mask (select from drop-down)
3. MAC address of LAN adapter on WOL computer. Use the command 'ipconfig /all' if you don't know what this is.
6. Click the green Send button. The WOL computer should respond with a pop-up box showing a packet was received.

Remote Wake On LAN via Port Forwarding

To remotely wake up a computer over the Internet using Wake On LAN- follow these instructions:

1 - Create a port forward rule on the Web Interface (Applications & Gaming -> Port Range Forward) to the chosen ip:

wol | 9 | 9 | udp | 192.168.1.254 | x

* Here, 9 is the default, but you can use any port number so long as your client wake-up application can talk to a port other than 9. Consider that most WOL services will use either UDP port 7 or 9.

2 - Add a static ARP entry by typing the following two lines into the Web Interface Administration -> Commands section and save with Save Startup.

ip neigh change 192.168.1.254 lladdr [MAC address to wake] nud permanent dev br0
ip neigh add 192.168.1.254 lladdr [MAC address to wake] nud permanent dev br0

3 - Reboot router, or execute the startup commands manually.

* To wake your computer from the internet using the DD-WRT device DynDNS name (or if you know it, the public IP of the router), try one of the following services;

1. Mestrona's online WOL. You need to forward port 9 udp in step one, to use this service.
2. Remote Wake-On-LAN. Seems to work both on ports 7 and 9 and allows WOL by a single URL of the form: http://mobile.wakeonlan.me/?ip=HOS [...] MACADDRESS
3. To use the WOL Magic Packet application from a second PC:
1. Host Name: DynDNS name of your DD-WRT device.
2. Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.255
3. MAC Address: WOL computer MAC address, not the DD-WRT MAC.
4. Click the green Send button.