Sunday, September 18, 2011

Create Wake On LAN Button to Remotely Wake Computer

I’ve got my MEDIA tower set to sleep when it’s not in use.  To avoid having to physically go wake up the computer by hitting a button or moving the mouse, imagesI’ve set the machine to Wake on LAN, which means I can wake the computer remotely by sending a command from another machine.  The machine being waked up (the MEDIA tower) needs to be physically attached to an ethernet cable (LAN connection) for this to happen.  You can, however, send the wake up commands wirelessly.

I used basically two sources to find this information.  For configuring my WOL set up, I used this link.  Note that all the firewall information is only necessary in order to use the testing programs to make sure you’re set up right.  You shouldn’t need to set firewall exceptions to simply send the wake command.

To create my WOL desktop shortcut, I used this link (this link also contains all the information from the previous link).

Basically, you need to set your BIOS on the target machine (the one you’re waking up) to allow Wake on LAN (settings will depend on your specific MOBO).  Then you need to download a tiny little program called MC-WOL from Matcode.com.  This little executable is what allows you to send a “magic packet” to wake the remote computer.

Find the MAC address of the machine you want to wake up (type getmac in a command line), and use it with the MC-WOL executable (type MC-WOL.exe and then the mac address from a command line).

[a command line means from a DOS window: type “cmd” from the Windows icon at the bottom left corner of your screen and a DOS window will pop up]

To create a shortcut for WOL, use the command you used to Wake your PC and copy it into notepad.

Example:     C:\mc-wol.exe 01:2C:21:E3:D8:5F

Save the text document and then change the .txt extension for that file to .bat.  You can now double click this file to run the Wake On LAN request for the target computer.

p.s. I first set up this button because I didn’t think I could cut/paste into a command line window, but then remembered if you right-click on the window border and select Edit>Paste from the drop-down you can paste into the command line (so you don’t have to manually type the MAC address).

2 comments:

fikret tursak said...

Thanks for this informative article. I had some troubles with Win 10. For example, after I upgraded it from win 8, my Wake-on-LAN does not work. I tried many things and

finally I solved the problem.
Here you can find how to configure Wake on LAN Windows 10

Carlos said...

Thanks man, it worked! Cheers