Wake your pvr Web Site

[BobBuilder]

On a couple of occasions Ive been away from home and wanted to shedule a recording but couldnt as my pvr was on standby.

I spent some time looking at wol and found a few useful cmd line driven tools and 1 good website which allowed u to type in your mac address and send a wol packet.
I liked the website method as It meant you didnt have to download a small wol app so could use it in more places.

The web method meant I had to have the mac address details to hand all the time so I decided to put a very very basic website together to send the packets and contain a link to my pvr web admin page.

I imagine every one who needs such a thing will already have somthing setup but I thought Id post it in case anyone found it useful.

You need a web hosting service which has perl scripting enabled, my ISP dosent give me scripting for free so Im using http://www.freehostia.com and am quite happy with the service, and very happy with the price

Im no expert on wol over the internet but have managed to get it working so will answer what questions I can.

Anyway here is a zip of the site, if anyone is interested in "tarting" it up that would be great, maybe it will make a worth addition to the wiki...

I have an initial "home" page which links to the wake page which is under a different directory so I can set a login password, the wol packet is built with a very simple perl script, I also have a simple form for selecting multiple machines.

Anyway I hope someone finds it useful in some way.

[stefan]

Cool. I've been thinking (very vaguely) about something like that, but never got around to actually doing anything about it. Now, since there is quite a good starting point thank's to you, I might actually get around to doing something about it

[betlit]

sorry for the (little) off topic post, but i tried to do something similair... my pvr is not 'directly' connected to the internet in i don't have some port forwarding enabled to it.
instead port 80 of my router is forwarded to a machine with an apache on it (i would not be able to sleep with a iis/.net-whatever-server directly accessable from outside).
the apache has a (password protected) virtual subdir which acts as a reverse proxy to the real pvr.

i wanted to be able to wake up the pvr machine by a perl script sending the magic package.
turns out i do not have to do this... somehow my pvr machine wakes up from _hibernation_ on _any_ incomming traffic (e.g. a simple ping to the machine or trying to access the webguide).

[stefan]

I have never tried that. That means that the simplest form that might work would be to have port forwarding to port 7648, and "allow this device to wake computer" on the network card. At least easy enough to try.

[betlit]

I have never tried that. That means that the simplest form that might work would be to have port forwarding to port 7648, and "allow this device to wake computer" on the network card. At least easy enough to try.

'allow this device to wake computer' sounds like winxp config... i was not aware that there is something like that (just checked the bios settings so far).

if this is the case i will _deactivate_ it. my pvr sometimes wakes up when no recording is due.. i guess one of my compies in the lan has the habit to check the network neighbourhood or something...

[stefan]

Yes, that is usually a problem you get when you set "allow device to wake computer" on a network card...

[BobBuilder]

If you "allow this device to bring the computer out of standby" any ping or any other type of network traffic will wake the machine, I find this is too sensitive in that the machine will constantly wake up.

On Winxp, there is a further checkbox of "Only allow management stations to bring the machine out of standby".
With this box checked the machine only wakes when the specifc magic packet is sent.
The macig packet is simply the mac address repeated 16 times in a udp packet.

As far as leaving the machine exposed is concerned, I only leave a specific UDP port open forwarding to that machine (pluss the http port to allow web sheduling). I also run a software firewall so Im not that worried, I would rather run this small risk that leave a machine on using power 24/7.



Bob

[BobBuilder]

Just to clarify with it set this way my machine never wakes up when it shouldnt, it only wakes up for a recording or when I deliberatly send a magij packet.

The page that sends the packet is also password protected to ensure Im the only one sending the packets.

Bob

[BobBuilder]

I should also mention, I think the options available for wol under XP such as restricting to specific magic packets in the way Ive mentioed will depend on the network card and the level of wol support.

All my machines support this option, but if u dont see it at your end then I guess your network card dosent support it.

[David]

sorry for the (little) off topic post, but i tried to do something similair... my pvr is not 'directly' connected to the internet in i don't have some port forwarding enabled to it.
instead port 80 of my router is forwarded to a machine with an apache on it (i would not be able to sleep with a iis/.net-whatever-server directly accessable from outside).
the apache has a (password protected) virtual subdir which acts as a reverse proxy to the real pvr.

i wanted to be able to wake up the pvr machine by a perl script sending the magic package.
turns out i do not have to do this... somehow my pvr machine wakes up from _hibernation_ on _any_ incomming traffic (e.g. a simple ping to the machine or trying to access the webguide).

Would you be willing to share more details. I mave tried reverse proxy through my apache box, but always get a 'Bad Gateway' error message. My apache experience is limited, but I do have the Popfile web admin working via reverse proxy.

On the other hand, Sub has calmed most of my fears by assuring me that the .net web server is not IIS, and not subject to all the vulnerabilities that it has. The web admin also seems to use reasonable security, though I wouldn't mind figuring out how to password protect and SSL the connection.