Most modern computers are capable of Wake on LAN which allows you to turn on a sleeping computer remotely by sending a “magic packet.” Scheduled applications, nighly backup for example, use this feature.
I use this feature to turn on my sleeping iMac when I am away from it but want to log on using ssh (I maintain one Ubuntu machine on the local network that is always running).
The magic packet format is very simple: it must include 6 times hexadecimal FF, followed by 16 times the target machine’s MAC address.
Here is a Python script that will wake up your target machine remotely.
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This script assumes that the target machine MAC address is 01-23-45-67-89-0a and that your local DHCP server issues an IP address of 192.168.2.109 to your target machine.
You can run this script from another machine on your local network, like so. 1
$ python wakeup.py
Got better ideas on waking up sleeping machines remotely when needed? Share below via comments.