Wake-on-lan trigger device for my office PC -- using OpenWRT?

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 08:45:57AM -0700, Brendan Kidwell wrote:
> 
> I like to power down stuff when I'm not using it -- save energy and save wear
> and tear and all that. But I'd also like to be able to remotely startup my
> office computer, since that's where all the good resources are, for example
> if I wanted to work at home on my laptop today.
> 
> I've determined that I can't send wake-on-lan messages to my PC from a
> remote host on the company VPN, nor does it work from a web server in the
> server room which is under my care. But I figure if I could setup a tiny
> Linux host or NAT running something like OpenWRT right there on my desk, I
> could just ssh into that and send the wake-up call from there. For security
> reasons, my company has a strong no-wifi-network policy, and I'd like to
> adhere to that.
> 
> So... what should I do?
> 
> 1. Buy an OpenWRT compatible wireless home router, install it with wifi
> disabled, and a friendly post-it saying "no, this is not a wifi router".
> 2. Buy some other non-wifi-capable home router and put something like
> OpenWRT on it -- do these even exist anymore?
> 3. Don't do anything like this, and just "Phone a friend" to startup my PC.
> 4. Something else?
> 
> I guess I'm asking what's the cheapest and simplest path towards my goal.

Talk to your company IT people? They might be happy with:
- not shutting down your office computer at all
- offering you a command on one of the servers to fire a WoL
  packet at your machine
- offering some other solution, like a remote power switch

They might ask "What are you doing keeping important things on
your desktop?". I know I might. I hate backing up desktop
machines, and so do most other people -- which is why there's
usually a policy about keeping everything important on a server
which does get backed up regularly. 

You can probably set your computer to wake at a designated time,
too. A cronjob to set that time and shutdown the machine would
only be a few lines.


-dsr-

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