1

Our company has been asked to recently switch off our computers over the weekends to conserve power. Is it possible to remotely switch on a Computer if

  1. I'm able to establish a VPN to the Office Network and I know the IP Address of my Machine.

I would think as long as I can be a part of the office network (because of the VPN I've established) there must be someway to power it on or at least schedule it to power on at certain times of the day. By the way this is not some VM. Its a Physical Machine.

Dhiwakar Ravikumar
  • 2,239

3 Answers3

1

Depends, normally you can use "magic packet" on ethernet layer to do "Wake-on-Lan" computer. Trouble is that this "magic packet" cannot be send over VPN because it is not ethernet but TCP/IP.

You must use some computer/server in office on the same LAN to send a packet. For example I am solving the same issue at my home and I will be using micro computer called Raspberry Pi (which costs around 30 USD and have power consumption around 2-5W when idle).

For example you can easily connect using by SSH to your Raspberry Pi over VPN and send magic packet from it.

Koss645
  • 41
1

For what you said or at least schedule it to power on at certain times of the day You can check this out:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/automatically-wake-up-from-windows-stand-by-and-hibernation/
Remember: You have to put your computer to hibernate or sleep instead of shutting it down.

Summary:

WakeOnStandBy

WakeOnStandBy can perform a number of tasks after it automatically wakes your computer up from hibernate or standby at a predefined time. What makes WakeOnStandBy quite useful is the option to easily set the program to wake up and perform a task such as run a program, open a webpage or play an audio/video file etc. Then you can choose to shutdown/sleep/hibernate the computer again after a specific time while running another program if you wish.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/download/did/1656/

KM Wakeup

KM Wakeup is more of a dedicated tool to wake up the computer from standby or hibernate and doesn’t concentrate so much on tons of different shutdown methods, although the basics of a timed suspend, hibernate and shutdown can be setup if you wish. The program also allows you to setup alarm lists which can be loaded, created and saved to be used on other computers or for different situations.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/download/did/1657/

You wanna shut down your computer? http://library.techguy.org/wiki/How_to:_Schedule_computer_to_turn_on_and_off_automatically

TechLife
  • 910
0

For a command line tool to perform the Wake-on-LAN (WOL) function from a Microsoft Windows system, I use the free mc-wol program, but there are many similar free programs. You need to know the media access control (MAC) address for the network card in your office system in order to send the magic packet to it. You can get a MAC address for a system by running ipconfig /all from a command prompt on the system (look for "physical address") or from another system with ping and arp -a or by using the same author's mcgetmac program.

If you can use WOL and your office system is a Microsoft Windows system, you may still need to ensure that Windows is configured to allow it to be "awakened", e.g., here are steps for Vista and someone else has steps for Windows 7 here. For some systems, you may need to configure Windows and make a BIOS setting change. If you can use the WOL functionality, I'd suggest checking that it works by sending the magic packet from another system before you leave the office for the weekend.

Alternatively, with some systems you can configure a system to awaken on its own at a speicifed time through a setting in the BIOS.

moonpoint
  • 5,268
  • 2
  • 21
  • 22