Accessing Home PC - Part 1

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.


How to wake up computer within your home network

Scenario: You are sitting at home watching football with your laptop but you need to access a file from another computer upstair which is off and you don’t want to get up…..

The technique to turn on remote PC is called Wake on LAN.  There are plenty of articles about WOL such as Wikipedia so I’m diving right into the technical part.  

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

Setting up home PC

First of all, you need to prepare your home PC and configure BIOS or Windows to accept the magic packets.  A very good article can be found at LifeHacker.  The main purpose of this step is to enable your network card to accept a magic packet in order to wake up your PC.

Once you are done with the basic PC preparation, you will need to find out the MAC address of your home PC.  Open up a DOS command shell and type the IPCONFIG command as such:

You will see a dump of information for all your network cards if you have more than one.  Find the one that directly connects to your router or broadband modem and the MAC address will be the “Physical Address.”  Write down the MAC address because you need this to wake up the home PC from your laptop.  WOL only works with wire connected network not wireless. 

Setting up laptop

Now, you need a client software on your laptop to send the magic packets.  The software basically broadcast magic packets to your network with the MAC address embedded.  You can download a good command line utility called MC-WOL.  Issue the command as such:

·         00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx is the MAC address you found earlier

Make sure your home PC is in sleep, hibernate, or shutdown mode before you test this.  With this command your computer should be turned right back on.

Congratulation!  You have done the first step.  We will proceed to wake up your home PC remotely.