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I Found Out I'm A WOL Geek

I found out last month how to use Wake On Lan (WOL) to start up my Linux development computer and I think it totally rocks. Now I don't have to get up and walk 10 feet to turn it on. I showed it to my wife and realized I had entered a new level of geekdom that I should really learn to just keep to myself.

Basically the steps are:

  1. Set up the BIOS on the computer you want to wake on lan. The bios has to have the ability to do this as well as your network card.
  2. Set up the system to wake on lan - I use ubuntu, so i followed these directions.
  3. Make sure the computer you want to wake up was shut off properly. A computer that didn't go though the shut down process will not wake from lan.
  4. Use a packet sending tool from any computer on the same network to wake it up. If you are using wol.exe, all you need to do is type wol 0a0a0a0a0a0a where the 0a0a0a0a0a0a is the mac address from the computer you want to wake up.