For the many years I’ve been working with computers, I never really got the chance to try out Wake On LAN, or usually referred to as WOL. For those who are not aware of this, this is simply a way of turning on your computer remotely by sending out network packets to it. Click here to get an in-depth explanation of what it is.
Most modern motherboards or network cards supports WOL and you can easily enable this on the BIOS. Lucky for me, that my old Pentium 4 PC with on-board network interface already has this feature. Since my home server is located downstairs along with all my network routers and modems, I decided to try WOL so I don’t have to come down every time I want to boot up my server. Most people might prefer their home server to run 24/7, but not me. I just want it to be on whenever I need to use it. Usually during daytime or if I need to sync up some files locally or onto my remote servers.
In my case enabling WOL through my server’s BIOS wasn’t sufficient for it to work. I had to enable it as well on my OS which is by the way Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition. This might not be the case for newer boards or network cards, but since my PC is a bit old then I had to let’s say “software enable” it as well. Doing this in Linux is pretty simple. To begin with you have to know your network card’s MAC address through:
/sbin/ifconfig
Just look for the “Ethernet Address” line and then take note of it since you’ll need it when using a WOL client which I’ll discuss later. Now to enable WOL just execute:
/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g
If you don’t want to do this anytime, just create a wol_enable file under /etc/network/ifup.d and then write these command inside this file. Then execute:
chmod a+x /etc/network/ifup.d/won_enable
This would basically enable WOL each time your network devices boot up.
Now for you to completely make use of WOL, you need to have a client to do so. Since I am using Mac OS, I downloaded a free WOL client from here. This client automatically searches for the computers in your LAN so I didn’t have to configure anything, but for some client you just need the IP address, MAC Address (which you should have taken note of), and for some even the subnet mask and listening port.
Well, that’s it. After setting things up I was able to boot up my PC without having to push the power button. 
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