Just Uber

I have recently been on a ‘green’ crusade through the house. I have a media server running Windows XP and GBPVR as a Personal Video Recorder, for the last year i have left this on 24/7/365 without much thought. I did all the normal things, power reduction by switching off the disks and screen etc but it meant i could use something like LogMeIn.com for remote access from work via a web page.

It worked great…..

but the new regime means running the media machine in either standby or hibernate mode after 15mins of inactivity (the GBPVR software is great for waking the machine from standby/hibernate to record programs) which meant logmein didn’t work.
So….
UPDATED

So WOL (or Wake On Lan) was needed, and works within the LAN from the laptops or from the little silver boxes – (or their proper name of MVP’s). These work by using a different version of embeded software (Open Source…) that can be found at http://www.mvpmc.org/. Just on a tangent – this software will allow me to use the MVPs with a myth box, something Chris has been on at me for some time to do…. but thats another Blog post…

Anyways – i digress.. back to the story, I needed a way of WOL over the internet, Chris and I pondered this for some time, he using a Solwise router with some hacked embeded linux firmware installed that allows WOL via a shell, but my Intertex IX66 will not allow this. So I found this website [www.rshut.com] that allows a magic packet to be sent over the web, and all I had to do was set up the router to forward any packets coming in on UDP port 9 to the media server.. and it works…!

I have been looking further into WOL, there are quite a few WOL php scripts out there and also this little number www.wakeonlan.org, which i have yet to test. This website has a small java app that you can use on your java enabled mobile phone (must be GPRS/3 etc enabled). I will try it out and post back information..

So I am now greener and still able to view the home PC (and unfiltered internet!) from work…

Update…. I have found out that the LogMeIn service is itself suspended when hibernate or suspend happens, so though the PC switches on the logmein is not available. One way to get around this is to use VNC or tightVNC and force the webinterface out on port 80 – HUGE security risk me thinks..
So i am working on a little C# app that will detect when the pc resumes from standby or hibernate and then switch on a service if it has been switched off. I will post the source code on here as soon as there is something to work with.

Adam

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 11:14 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.