Wake Remotely

[ydekmekji]

My Win7 nPVR unit is hooked to the internet through a wifi adapter. I have S3 power management on it, which is working great on me. The problem is if the machine is sleeping, I can't access it remotely.

On my old unit, i had an old school modem hooked up to it, so I can wake the machine by calling home. That did the trick, except that the machine turned on every time we got a phone call.

Here's my idea: Create a "Don't Power Off" script that I put in a shared Dropbox folder. When the machine is awake (updating EPG, recording, etc...), it checks that folder for that script. If it's there, the machine knows to stay on indefinitely.

When I'm not home, I can access that dropbox folder and put that file there. So it's not an immediate wake, but at the very least, if i'm gone for a few days, I can have some way of accessing my machine if needed....

1. What do you guys think?
2. Is there an easier way to wake remotely?

[ElihuRozen]

Can you set your lan card to wake your machine? If I access it remotely, the machine will wake up & go back to sleep when I'm done. There might be a setting in your BIOS & there might be a setting for an card itself, too. Search for Wake On Lan. It's the same logic that allows my PCH to wake it.

[ydekmekji]

The problem is that i'm connected to the internet wirelessly and not through the lan... I have WOL turned on in bios, but the only thing attached to it is my HD Homerun device

[martint123]

The snag is that WOL does not route over the internet. It is at a much lower level, just being able to talk to the cards MAC address.
The only way out would be another, always on, device that could send a WOL - like a NAS, NMT/PCH etc that you could talk to.
The dropbox idea is good. You could have the system always run the same script from there and just change it as required (I have a 'gbpvr' and an 'always-on' scheme that I use). In addition I run a scheduled task in the late evening to set the scheme back to a hibernating one so that it goes off when viewing is over.

[Sykor]

When I'm not home, I can access that dropbox folder and put that file there. So it's not an immediate wake, but at the very least, if i'm gone for a few days, I can have some way of accessing my machine if needed....

1. What do you guys think?
2. Is there an easier way to wake remotely?

Before I finally figured how to properly setup the WOL scheme, when I was away for a few days I would shift the EPG update to say 7 or 8 PM, and changed the sleep timeout from 20min to an 1 hour or 2, depending on how certain I was of being able to access the internet around that period. Given that my EPG update usually took around 45minutes, this scheme gave me a decent chance of catching my mediacenter up and running, while cutting down on the electricity bill.

Using your method, if you went away, the server would be always on after the next EPG update. Which could be longer than desirable if you only need to access it after 3/4 days.

A second wi-fi router (if you have one available) setup next to your server would solve your problem. Configuring it as a simple wi-fi network repeater, and connecting the server through a lan cable to it, you would retain the wireless connection (router<->repeater) to the internet and get a chance of using WOL to wake your server.

Never tried it, but I suppose it should work. Although all this is academic if your router doesn't support WOL (the router they use at work does not support port forwarding to the network broadcast IP xxx.xxx.xxx.255, rendering remote WOL impossible).

[ydekmekji]

I'm intrigued by having a second wi-fi router.... I have an old netopia router/modem lying around that I think can be configurable (those things are a beast to configure)... you think it'll work???