My Objectives

Forum: Networking
Topic: My Objectives
started by: Petrohead

Posted by Petrohead on Sep. 04 2004,04:43

Here's what I'd like to accomplish with DSL.

1.) A headless machine,,,, power and network cable ONLY

2.) FTP server so I can get to my tools and doc's

That's it ......

Optional

3.) Wake the OS up from anywhere.
In otherwords, have the computer turned off but powered (plugged in),, with a network card (that stays 'live'/'listens' / Wake on LAN ) with the power plugged in,, connected to an always on ISP modem, connected to a router and I can 'tickel' it back to life.

# 1 and # 2 should be a cake walk, however I may need some direction.
# 3, I believe will be a bit of a challenge, but should be 'do-able' (hence the optional).

The equipment I'm using is an old PII 350 with 128 MB's RAM. It's an NEC with a funky IDE setup. IDE primary includes the first HDD (8 gig drive), plus,, believe it or not,, the A: drive is on the same IDE cable.

HDD is primary and A: is slave.

IDE secondary has the CD-Rom as primary and a 40 gig drive as slave.

Both HDD's have been formatted with FAT32. I installed DSL to the first drive, hda1 = 100MB's for DSL and hda2 = 300 MB's for swap. So I still have 7.5 gig left there. DSL see's the second HDD as hdd5.

Any comments appreciated.

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 04 2004,17:27

you need to make sure that your BIOS supports wake-on-lan and also your NIC card.

I have seen wake-on-lan used before as part of a small subnetwork. I have not seen it work from the Internet as a whole. Somehow you would need to find your computer's MAC address in order to do the waking part and my guess is that you will only see the MAC address of the cable modem itself. You definately won't be able to see the computer's MAC address if it is connected via a router.

My guess is that your best hope would be to purchase a router that runs on an embedded version of Linux like the Linksys WRT54G. Then modify the router with a custom firmware that allows you to hack into the router via an ssh terminal session. Then you can compile and install a linux program that is used to "wake" up computers. Since the router is directly connected to your PC, it could issue the signal to wake up.

So in summary:

Buy a WRT54G or similar product. Hack into it so that it will do your bidding.
Find a "wake up computer x" linux program and compile it for the embedded linux CPU like the "ARM" processor.
Install the compiled program into your router.
From anywhere in the world, log into your router and command it to wake up your PC for you.

It is not an easy task, but it is technically possible.

I am sure that there are other ways to solve the problem, but this is my proposal.