Anyway to Remotely switch on / off a computer

Hi all
In the interests of "Energy conservation" is there any sort of device that I could use to remotely power on a computer.

I like to have a home server running - but these days with all the beefed up hardware we could be talking of 200 - 300 watts running all day and night when I'm only logged on for maybe 30 mins a day.

If you take the number of people these days leaving computers running all the time thats a HUGE amount of "Wasted" energy to say nothing of adding to your electricity bills.

There must be some engineer out there who could design a really SMALL device which is connected to your router. When you accessed this it could power on your machine. This device would say consume only 5 watts or so -- still not zero but a HUGE improvement over having the computer powered on all the time.

Mind you these days in W. Europe - at least outside Germany whoever does Engineering anymore unfortunately. - A device like this however could make you HUGE bucks though.

Cheers
jimbo

It's possible to implement that sort of thing in software, assuming a modern machine:

Powerup: look up "wake on LAN" (WOL). It takes a bit of configuration.
Shutdown: many ways to do it, including TS-ing into the target machine to shut it down (mstsc.exe), or using the "/m \\target_name" switch with the shutdown.exe utility (built into win 7) to send a shutdown command to another computer.

The other approach you might want to consider, depending on your exact requirements, is a NAS. Many of them are optimised for low-power idling, and given sufficiently "green" drives ("WD Caviar Green" leaps to mind), they'll only consume negligible power when sitting and doing nothing.

As said above you already have what you need, Wake-on-LAN (had a quick look, but didn't find anything on the tutorials),

Access Your Computer Anytime and Save Energy with Wake-on-LAN - Hack Attack - Lifehacker

I might be missing something here, but unless the router includes the capability of sending a WoL packet to its local network then you'll not be able to do what you're suggesting as WoL packets are non-routable traffic. i.e you can't send a Wake-On-LAN request to a different network from the one you're on.

jpjeffery said:

I might be missing something here, but unless the router includes the capability of sending a WoL packet to its local network then you'll not be able to do what you're suggesting as WoL packets are non-routable traffic. i.e you can't send a Wake-On-LAN request to a different network from the one you're on.

I didn't get the feeling that the OP was talking about multiple network segments.

The "router" seemed incidental in the sense that it was always on, so when they wished to access the (off) "home server", it would be done courtesy of the router invoking the hypothetical device which powers up the server. In this instance, both the (unmentioned) workstation and the server are presumably on the same network segment.

I may of course have misunderstood.

Yes, you could be right. I just automatically applied it to my own application where I want to power-up my PC at home from my office, which I can only do if my server at home is already on. Defeats the whole power-saving objective though!

jpjeffery said:

i.e you can't send a Wake-On-LAN request to a different network from the one you're on.

I've done WOL from the internet. You don't have to be on the same network segment.

All you need to do is port forward the WOL UDP port through the firewall and let it know the MAC address of the computer to forward it to (via static ARP or static DHCP). In some cases you can even port forward to the network's broadcast address.