Accessing Home PC - Part 2

This is a 6-part discussions designed to help maximize resources on your home PC. We will show you how to turn on home PC remotely, establish a secure tunnel, remote control home PC, or see your home webcam. Remember, there are always alternative, I’m here to share with you my experience.

Turn on home PC remotely

Scenario: You are sitting at a Starbucks with a laptop and would like to show some pictures saved in your home PC to your friends…..

In this section we are going to show you how to turn on computer through the home router.  As you can expect it, the hurdle is to setup your router correctly.  This demo will focus on how to configure a Verizon FIOS router (Actiontec MI424WR).  Please Google your router for the setup information.

This is a 2-tier setup process that you need to configure your router and setup a client laptop to complete the setup.

Configure your home router

If you Google “Wake on LAN Verizon router,” you will find plenty of articles describing the technical reasons behind all these work (example).  The basic idea is to tell your router when a magic packet is arrived at the router on a specific external port, it should be routed/broadcasted within the internal LAN.  This step is very tricky and very much router specific so Google it if you are not using Actiontec MI424WR router.

First, login to your router and enable your local telnet session from the Advanced menu if it is not already enabled:

Check the “Using Primary Telnet Port (23) and click Apply

Next telnet into your router from a command line shell as such:

C:\>telnet 192.168.1.1

After login with your Actiontec MI424WR admin account and password then enter the highlighted commands as shown below:

• System shell: to enter shell command mode
• arp -s 192.168.1.254 FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF : always enter as this. 

The 2nd command will add a semi-permanent entry into the ARP table to tell the router how to broadcast a magic packet.  However, the information will be wiped out if you ever lost the power to your router.  You will need to redo this step again.

Now, you should see a line in your ARP table like this:

Next you need to setup a port forwarding rule.  From your Actiontec MI424WR “Firewall Settings” menu to add a new port rule like this:

• Local Host: this must be 192.168.1.254 for broadcast IP
• Protocol: use UDP and specify an external port.  I used 10099 here.  You can use “User Defined” to add a new item like it is shown here.
• WAN Connection Type: leave this to “All Broadband Devices”
• Forward to Port: this could be any port#.  9 is used here as default.

Click Apply to complete the setup.  Once completed you will see a port rule in the Port Forwarding table as shown below:

Setting up Laptop

Lastly, for testing, you will need a client tool to wake up the home PC.  MC-WOL which used in the previous discussion doesn’t allow you to specify port so we will need a new tool.  You can download the command line or GUIversion from Depicus.com. 

Before you run the command, find out your external IP that your ISP assigned to you.  You can do so by looking at the status on your router or type in http://www.whatismyip.com from your browser to llok up.

Then open up a command line shell and enter the command:

• 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx: is the MAC address of your home PC  
• 250.123.200.121: is your external IP for your home network  
• 255.255.255.255: always use this one for your mask
• 10099: is the external port# you used when you created the Port Forwarding rule earlier.

That’s it.  This should enable you to turn on your home PC any time and any where you want.  Next, we are going to show you how to get your home IP even without paying a static IP address in the.