Slashdot Mirror
Setting up a System w/ Wake-on-LAN and VNC?
andrebsd asks: "I'd like to make myself some sort of webpage where I could startup my system with 'Wake on Lan', and once it is started, use VNC to login. Once I'm done doing what I need the system for I would then like to shut it down again. I'm wondering how one might go about putting something like this together. VNC has various scripts for making that part work, but I haven't seen any scripts that can function as a 'Power on/Power off' button for a webpage. Thanks to anyone with any way of doing this." While there are helpful reference for Wake-on-LAN tools, how would you integrate all of these into a coherent system? How might one keep such a system (relatively) secure?
first posttttttttttttttt?
It'd be nice if you told us what kind of system you are planning on doing this to. Other hosts on the network that DON'T sleep? info, info, info!
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
You'll need to lookup the precise specifications for WOL. Basically you simply send the MAC address three times to the target machine over UDP. Then the NIC wakes the computer up.
It's not very difficult to do this with a perl script or something similar that can be integrated into a web page.
Another alternative that may interest you if your target computer has access to a phoneline is "Wake on Ring". Some BIOS vendors (Abit was one) allow a modem to power on a PC after a specified number of rings.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Where is your "system"?
You do realize that Wake on LAN is a layer two protocol, right? I.e. it's an ethernet protocol that has nothing to do with IP, UDP, or TCP.
The webserver that is hosting this webpage will have to be on the same local area network [layer two] as your "system." So:
where the final arrow MUST be on the same local area network.The person who administers the webserver [the second to last point in the diagram] must give you sufficient rights to some daemon on that webserver so as to allow you to send out a layer two [ethernet] packet via that daemon. If you yourself are not the administrator of this webserver, the chances of you getting those kind of rights are between slim and none. The standard sandboxes, such as the Java sandbox, don't allow you to get anywhere near sending a layer two packet.
The Future of SLASHDOT.
You could write a cgi-program that calls Etherwake. Or you could be even more savvy and write a cgi or php program that just sends out the wake-on-lan "magic packet" by itself. It's just an ethernet packet. Bear in mind thought that the webserver is going to need to be on the same network as the machine that you are trying to wake up or it won't work.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
take your non openboot/OBP firmware and your cheap shit china razor chink china fucking crap shit and fuck off. take your shit fake crap and fuck off.
LONG LIVE Alpha SRM, LONG LIVE OBP. Death to BIOS and fag shit like PXE and other PeeCee faggor crap.
YOU FUCK WALLOW LIKE PIGS IN THE PIG STY OF CHEAP SHIT HARDWARE FROM CHINA AND OTHER SHITHOLES, FUCK YOU FOR SUPPORT SHIT YOU SHITMONGERING FUCKERS.
Usually webmin would be the best bet, but they don't seem to have a Wake on Lan module yet.
I suppose you can take one of the hundreds of perl WOL scripts and pretty easily(though not completely pain free Google: "perl wake on lan"), issue a WOL command.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Fag, fucking fag,.
take your non openboot/OBP firmware and your cheap shit china razor chink china fucking crap shit and fuck off. take your shit fake crap and fuck off.
LONG LIVE Alpha SRM, LONG LIVE OBP. Death to BIOS and fag shit like PXE and other PeeCee faggor crap.
YOU FUCK WALLOW LIKE PIGS IN THE PIG STY OF CHEAP SHIT HARDWARE FROM CHINA AND OTHER SHITHOLES, FUCK YOU FOR SUPPORT SHIT YOU SHITMONGERING FUCKERS.
Cheap ass cant afford SCSI china loving fag.
GUI fag detected. fag needs webmin to do basic unix shit because he is a dumb stupid fag. oh no, faggie needs a form because RTFM is too hard for doo doo stained diaper boy.
FUCKING RED ALERT - Fag who loves LinSUX and cheap assed PCs found.
What's wrong with something simple? Throw a .htaccess in a directory with this (untested) script.2 3.123"; // or whatever
<html><body>
<?php
$machine="123.123.1
$connect="wakeonlan --wakeup $machine";
if($_REQUEST['connect']) {
exec($connect);
?>
Starting up <?=$machine?>.
<?php
} elseif(ping($machine)) {
?>
<?=$machine?> is up.
<?php
} else {
?>
<?=$machine?> is down. <a href="?connect=1">Start up</a>.
<?php
}
?>
</body></html>
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I use WOL to turn my Windows XP PC on by SSH'ing to my Linux server on the same LAN, then running the Linux WOL utility to turn the Windows PC on. Then I have the Terminal Services service running on the WinXP system on a non-default port where I can shut it down if I want to (using tsshutdn). It might also be possible to shut the system down remotely from the Linux system with Samba, but I've never tried that.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
You can make this more complicated if you like: But the idea is that, as before, the "box that is always on" must be on the same local area network as your "system," and you must have been granted sufficient privileges at the "box that is always on" so as to be able to send a layer two [ethernet] packet.
This will be nigh unto impossible unless you are the owner of said "box that is always on," in which case your "system" might as well be "always on" itself.
If you have a home lan and run the website off one PC that's always on, it should work.
I'm not sure how well Wake-On-Lan works when the packets are being sent from the internet to a cable modem with a PC that's off. Specifically, if no IP address is allocated to you, why are they going to route any packets in your direction?
If there is a correspondance between physical 'neighborhood' and IP subnet, then perhaps it will still work.
I tried getting WOL to work once and didn't have much success. There are plenty of command-line utilities for generating the packets. I think they just sent special packets to a particular (unused) UDP port.
Good Luck!
You need to bury the link deeper; I could still see it in my status bar on mouseover.
Why WOL? Why not use a ultra low power unit, set to start VNC or whatever on modem ring. Perhaps set it up to something like a dialup script, where it expects and the phone sends certain tones in order for authentication.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I have a couple boxes on my network, one of which is a linux box that is "always-on". I have the SSH port (port 22) open to incoming connections from outside the network, and I have a VNC port open able to get to from outside the network, on the windows machine. I just ssh into my linux box, and run a simple perl script (I already recorded the NICs MAC address) to send the magic packet to the windows machine, give it a couple minutes, and then VNC on in to my windows machine. . .
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Maybe one piece of the puzzle of making Wake-on-LAN over VNC work would be to have a DSL modem, and some kind of always-on appliance that could be programmed to turn on the computer. The appliance must have an Internet address. This is the idea, but it is too expensive: Internet Power Switch. Maybe this would be better: 1-Port Serial Device Servers, but no price is listed.
You have a good basic idea. You don't want to leave the computer on all the time, but you would like to VNC the computer when you need it. Actually, I want that too.
All you need is a low-voltage switch with an Internet address. You can adjust the OS to turn on when the power switch is pressed and hibernate if the power switch is pressed, if the computer is already on. If you need a cold re-boot, you can run the shutdown command from VNC, using a time delay.
A switch with an Internet address need cost no more than $50. The question is, who sells such a switch?
Set it up like this
internet -> Webserver -> priv network -> Machine
You use the internet to hit the webserver which is a machine that is on both the internet and the private network. The web server has scripts that allow it to run some WOL script to wake the machine and then checks every now and then to see if the machine is started and the vnc server is running, now that you have the machine running be sure it is configured to run the java vnc server so all you have to do is connect to the vnc server machine with a web browser, not sure how to do this but im guessing there is a way to do it with some sort of url hacking. And as for shutting the machines off when you done, use vnc to turn them off, that always works for me.
Hope that all makes sence to you because it does in my head.
I do this all the time on my MacOS X systems, with Apple Remote Desktop. It has the ability to wake or sleep CPUs by remote control over the LAN. Right now I'm in bed using my laptop, I left my main CPU in my office downstairs doing a download, I checked its progress remotely just like VNC works, it just finished a few minutes ago, so I issued a remote sleep command. If I want to remotely wake it and start some other task I can do that too. ARD is built in to every Panther system, but the ARD Client software must be purchased separately. But you get what you pay for. ARD is killer software.
If you want to do it with GSM and SMS, you will have less things to worry about and more control. I had something similar to control el. devices using GSM. Take a cheap cellphone, take an Atmel or a philips micro-cont, poll the cell phone using handmade module and connect a live circuit, as soon as predefined sms comes complete the circuit. Depending on the controller you use, you can control up to 8 devices.
I see lots of posts for using a local server that is always. I guess this will work for a lot of techie places... but what about everyone else?
Are there any cheap routers that can send a simple WOL message? Are there any that have been hacked so that someone can add this function?
The only catch to all of this is that you need to have another computer on the same LAN that is always switched on.
Having said that, you may as well have your extra PC always turned on as well, but with power saving enabled.
If only you could wake up machines straight over the internet...
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
I'm sorry, but I've gotta call you on that.
Even if there were such a thing as "static ARP association for the last hop", there ain't a network administrator in the world who would allow that kind of traffic to pass over his routers.
At least the "standard AMD Magic Packet format" of WoL is ethernet-type 0x0842, not IP (0x0800). Instead of an IP-packet with dest- and source ip address it just contains repeatedly
"FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 11 22 33 44 55"
(if 00:11:22:33:44:55 is the target MAC). So it won't pass any routers, You have to do this in an ethernet-segment. Try
# ether-wake 00:11:22:33:44:55
and catch it with Your favorite sniffer.
It would be senseless to use IP for WoL, as the arp-table of the last router has already forgotten the MAC of the dest ip and cannot resolve via arp-request it as the destination host is sleeping. If You have no machine next to Your target, You're lost.
graf0z.
You're right, but you can use IP if you use the remote subnet's broadcast address (i.e. no ARP request is needed). The perl WOL utility allows you to specify the IP to use.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Everybody seems to have great solutions for that question, so let's make it tougher:
How about when I've got only one system, and it connects using PPPoE to the outside world... can anybody solve *that* one?
How about if pull out the power plug before I leave for work in the morning?
Get an APC 9210 power switch off Ebay. Then make sure that your system turns on immediatly when power is applied. Login to the power switch, turn on the power to that box, and viola.
We use these where I work for remote control of systems that have to be cold-booted every so often.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Not too long ago I was given the "Kiosk project" at my work environment.
As far as your concerned these are winXP machines. We have 4 on the same lan. I was thinking of having a wake-on-lan system that would force a kiosk to send a "wake-on-lan" request to a neibooring kiosk if it was offline.
But that doesn't really help me if the kiosk is crashed and online. Is there a similar "reset-on-lan" feature out there?
I haven't implemented it yet but I don't think I'll have any problems since I'm doing it manually right now...
Computers and their ethernet addresses are in a database(MySQL for me).
Apache/PHP generates the page from the database and a small script to determine whether the computers are on/off(SNMP for me though a single ping would work--access limitation would be a given for this page anyway).
Wake-up link simply runs etherwake with the address from the database--yeah, external calls to suid root utils are bad...access limited to the page anyway and data validation is mandatory.
VNC is provided by a simple link to the Java port--http://computername:5900.
I know the WOL connector on the motherboard provide 5V, but I wonder how much mA one can pull out of it ?
Think powering an out-of-case device (in my case, a IR receiver).
:wq
I usually just shut mine down to hibernate with
shutdown -h 25
$ shutdown --help
Usage: shutdown [OPTION]... secs|"now"
Bring the system down.
-f, --force Forces the execution.
-s, --shutdown The system will shutdown and power off (if supported)
-r, --reboot The system will reboot.
-h, --hibernate The system will suspend to disk (if supported)
-p, --suspend The system will suspend to RAM (if supported)
--help Display this help and exit.
--version Output version information and exit.
To reboot is the default if started as `reboot', to hibernate if started
as `hibernate', to suspend if started as `suspend', to shutdown otherwise.
Posting Anonymously to protect the guilty party.
OK, so on our dorm LAN, we register users MAC-adresses. So one night, my buddy wonders aloud: "Hmmm, what would happen if we made a nice little perl script that got all the MAC adresses, and send them some wake-up packets...?"
We laugh a little, and I promptly forget about it.
OK, so we used to have a little graph over how many machines responded to ping on the network. Sampled every five minutes, usually very sine-like, with top around 10pm, and bottom around 4am.
So a week later, I get a screendump in the mail, of our graph, with a notable rise right around 3.30am, quickly flattening out. Turns out the BOFH-in-training had actually gone ahead and done it. Had quite a chuckle over that...
Use a shell app that sends a WoL packet to the system, executed using the php shell_exec("command") operator.
That'll turn the system on, then, VNC as necessary.
To turn off, VNC in and click shutdown or shutdown -k now or w/e.
Wake on LAN through a router/firewall
One thing worth noting is that the windows software they used to send magic WOL packets sent them to UDP port 2304. I don't know if this port is standard, so if WOL works through your firewall with their program but not ether-wake or some other software, find out what port your software uses and subsititure that into the firewall forwarding rules.
I'm getting zero hits on this mystery technique called "static ARP association": Doe it have another name?
Yes, this capability is available but it requires special hardware.
There are two solutions that offer what you seek. First you can use server hardware like HP/Compaq with built in Out Of Band(OOB) management cards or Lights Out management cards in them. These cards are IP addressable and connect into the system's BIOS. They allow you to power the system on and off as well as view the boot up screens and even access and change the BIOS settings, all remotely. These are very powerful and indespensible for managing remote servers but, they are not cheap options that you will find in desktop class hardware.
The second option, and the one you will most likely want to use because it is far less expensive, is the IP enabled power switch. There are many different ones but, here is a simple example. Simply send the power on/off command to the power outlet and it restarts your system for you, remotely via TCP/IP. Not nearly as powerful as the Lights Out management card but it gets the blue screened PC rebooted, which is what you said you wanted.
It seems to be a common misconception that WOL doesn't work across the internet. WOL works across the internet just fine. I've used DSLReport's web based utility here and it works perfectly.