I was scanning the net today for ways to turn on any computer remotely. The solution I stumbled upon was Wake-On-LAN (WOL). (Read more) What’s more good, is that most of the computers sold today support this feature.

To know if your system supports this feature or not run the following command

sudo ethtool eth0

You will get output similar to the one below.

Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
   Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
                           100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
   Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
   Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
                           100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
   Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
   Speed: 100Mb/s
   Duplex: Full
   Port: MII
   PHYAD: 32
   Transceiver: internal
   Auto-negotiation: on
   Supports Wake-on: pumbg
   Wake-on: g
   Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
   Link detected: yes

In the above please substitute eth0 with the network interface card’s name you want to listen for “Magic Packets“. The Supports Wake-on gives the methods your card supports to wake your computer up. In the output above, this card supports waking on any physical activity, on unicast message, on multicast message, on broadcast message and “Magic Packets” respectively. A value of d for Supports Wake-on means that your card doesn’t support WOL. (For the full list of meanings for these letters see ethtool‘s manpage under the wol portion.) In the output above Wake-on is g, which means that WOL for eth0 is enabled and is set to listen for “Magic Packets” only.

Useful links:-

1. On Wkipedia, has steps to enable WOL via Windows.
2. How-to for Ubuntu users.
3. Very useful resource on WOL.
4. Shutdown remote computers using Magic Packets.