Remote wake or turn on

John Young wrote on :

Every thing is running on ML using Back to My Mac. Two different WiFi connections. Home Computer is a Mac Pro. Travel computer is a Mac Book Pro. Router is a Airport Extreme with my iCloud ID entered in the appropriate place. One iCloud acc with both computers signed into the same iCloud acc. I know the common iCloud acc is what lets the two computers connect even on different Wifi connections. Connecting the two computers works fine then screen sharing works great.

My one and only big problem is I can't/don't want to go vacation and not at least let my Mac Pro Sleep. I go for up to a month at a time. I can not get My Mac Pro to wake form sleep. In System Preferences/Energy Saver I do have "Wake for network access" checked and I thought that would do it but no luck. I have tried it with my Mac Pro connected with ethernet and wifi and both work fine. I have installed no extra software everything I need to connect and screen share seems to be built into Mountain Lion.

I have seen some utilities ETC. that work if you are on the same network but none that work if on different networks. Some claim to but I can't get them to work. I have a disk that is a clone in my Mac Pro for testing and have used that with apps like Splashtop2 and the built in features in ML seem to work much better.

Any help form the would be greatly appreciated.

JF Mezei replied on :

John Young wrote:

Every thing is running on ML using Back to My Mac. Two different WiFi connections. Home Computer is a Mac Pro. Travel computer is a Mac Book Pro. Router is a Airport Extreme with my iCloud ID entered in the appropriate place.

The "wake on lan" only work on hardwarired ethernet as I recall (noy 100% sure). It is a layer 2 protocol (ethernet level) which builds the ethernet packet in a special way. And the sender need to know the ethernet address of the computer to wake so it can build the packet directed at it.

I believe that while the protocol theoretically allows one to write such an application to send the "wake up" packet to the mac, Apple expects you to use one of its routers to do that job. (Airport something).

I read up on this some time ago and it is sort of wishy washy in my memory by now. But this may give you some track to follow to get more details.

Lewis replied on :

In message 502f3052$0$44374$c3e8da3$f017e9df@redacted.invalid JF Mezei jfmezei.spamnot@redacted.invalid wrote:

John Young wrote:

Every thing is running on ML using Back to My Mac. Two different WiFi connections. Home Computer is a Mac Pro. Travel computer is a Mac Book Pro. Router is a Airport Extreme with my iCloud ID entered in the appropriate place.

The "wake on lan" only work on hardwarired ethernet as I recall (noy 100% sure).

That used to be the case, but is not the case for quite a few years. The wireless variety is called WoWLAN instead of WoL.

To activate it, you just have to send a valid "magic packet" to the device. It is possible to have an old router that will discard WoL packets, but it would have to be pretty old.

John Young replied on :

In article slrnk2ue5g.iuc.g.kreme@redacted.invalid, Lewis g.kreme@redacted.invalid wrote:

In message 502f3052$0$44374$c3e8da3$f017e9df@redacted.invalid JF Mezei jfmezei.spamnot@redacted.invalid wrote:

John Young wrote:

Every thing is running on ML using Back to My Mac. Two different WiFi connections. Home Computer is a Mac Pro. Travel computer is a Mac Book Pro. Router is a Airport Extreme with my iCloud ID entered in the appropriate place.

The "wake on lan" only work on hardwarired ethernet as I recall (noy 100% sure).

That used to be the case, but is not the case for quite a few years. The wireless variety is called WoWLAN instead of WoL.

To activate it, you just have to send a valid "magic packet" to the device. It is possible to have an old router that will discard WoL packets, but it would have to be pretty old.

The Router is a Airport Extreme with v7.6.1 which is the current firmware.I have tried it with ethernet,WiFi and both connected to my Mac Pro5,1. I really think its a setting in the Airport Extreme. Most of what I find while searching with Google is old material. Still I; Thank you Lewis and JF Mezei for your replies! I am still searching any more help would be great.

John Young replied on :

In article jy-62358F.07250318082012@redacted.invalid, John Young jy@redacted.invalid wrote:

In article slrnk2ue5g.iuc.g.kreme@redacted.invalid, Lewis g.kreme@redacted.invalid wrote:

In message 502f3052$0$44374$c3e8da3$f017e9df@redacted.invalid JF Mezei jfmezei.spamnot@redacted.invalid wrote:

John Young wrote:

Every thing is running on ML using Back to My Mac. Two different WiFi connections. Home Computer is a Mac Pro. Travel computer is a Mac Book Pro. Router is a Airport Extreme with my iCloud ID entered in the appropriate place.

The "wake on lan" only work on hardwarired ethernet as I recall (noy 100% sure).

That used to be the case, but is not the case for quite a few years. The wireless variety is called WoWLAN instead of WoL.

To activate it, you just have to send a valid "magic packet" to the device. It is possible to have an old router that will discard WoL packets, but it would have to be pretty old.

The Router is a Airport Extreme with v7.6.1 which is the current firmware.I have tried it with ethernet,WiFi and both connected to my Mac Pro5,1. I really think its a setting in the Airport Extreme. Most of what I find while searching with Google is old material. Still I; Thank you Lewis and JF Mezei for your replies! I am still searching any more help would be great.

One more thought...I don't care how I wake the home computer as long as I can at any given time. Is there an iPhone app that might turn on a computer?

John Young replied on :

In article jy-BF4383.07345618082012@redacted.invalid, John Young jy@redacted.invalid wrote:

In article jy-62358F.07250318082012@redacted.invalid, John Young jy@redacted.invalid wrote:

In article slrnk2ue5g.iuc.g.kreme@redacted.invalid, Lewis g.kreme@redacted.invalid wrote:

In message 502f3052$0$44374$c3e8da3$f017e9df@redacted.invalid JF Mezei jfmezei.spamnot@redacted.invalid wrote:

John Young wrote:

Every thing is running on ML using Back to My Mac. Two different WiFi connections. Home Computer is a Mac Pro. Travel computer is a Mac Book Pro. Router is a Airport Extreme with my iCloud ID entered in the appropriate place.

The "wake on lan" only work on hardwarired ethernet as I recall (noy 100% sure).

That used to be the case, but is not the case for quite a few years. The wireless variety is called WoWLAN instead of WoL.

To activate it, you just have to send a valid "magic packet" to the device. It is possible to have an old router that will discard WoL packets, but it would have to be pretty old.

The Router is a Airport Extreme with v7.6.1 which is the current firmware.I have tried it with ethernet,WiFi and both connected to my Mac Pro5,1. I really think its a setting in the Airport Extreme. Most of what I find while searching with Google is old material. Still I; Thank you Lewis and JF Mezei for your replies! I am still searching any more help would be great.

Using Airport Utilities/Network/Enable Access Control. I checked "Enable Access Control" and set no times limits. Seems to work fine. The Mac Book Pro going through iCloud wakes the Mac Pro and gives me complete control of the Desktop with the Mac Pro connected to my home network and the Mac Book Pro connected to a Verizon 4G lte Jetpack MiFi that I use for travel. Thanks again!

JF Mezei replied on :

Lewis wrote:

To activate it, you just have to send a valid "magic packet" to the device. It is possible to have an old router that will discard WoL packets, but it would have to be pretty old.

By definition, a router will discard the wake on lan packet because the later is a layer 2 ethernet packet, and routers are layer 3.

Combinations of router/bridge (bridge=switch in modern terms) may or may not work depending on their config.

Where the airport box different is that it has software to remember the ethernet address of a host (permanenly, not via arp), so you can send an IP packet to the Airport asking it to wake a machine by IP address. The Airport will then send the magic ethgernet packet on the LAN, addressed to that machine's ethernet address.

Wes Groleau replied on :

On 08-18-2012 07:34, John Young wrote:

One more thought...I don't care how I wake the home computer as long as I can at any given time. Is there an iPhone app that might turn on a computer?

I haven't bought it, but I heard a teacher raving about using "Splashtop" to control her computer from anywhere in the classroom.

There are two apps whose names start with Splashtop. One of them includes a wake-on-LAN feature.

John Young replied on :

In article 502fcef6$0$1862$c3e8da3$dbd57e7@redacted.invalid, JF Mezei jfmezei.spamnot@redacted.invalid wrote:

Where the airport box different is that it has software to remember the ethernet address of a host (permanenly, not via arp), so you can send an IP packet to the Airport asking it to wake a machine by IP address. The Airport will then send the magic ethgernet packet on the LAN, addressed to that machine's ethernet address.

Works every time for me as long as I'm logged into the same iCloud ACC. Does not matter what Wifi networks I am using on which computer. Special thanks to JF Mezei for taking the time to answer and always having the correct answers. I don't think I ever would have started looking at the AirPort Extremes setting if he had not pointed me in that direction.