Anyone used Wake on LAN?

I currently have a server (Home XP) that runs 75 hours a week using a power socket timer. Due to recent changes in usage I'm interested in having it only power on when actually needed. At first glance WOL seems like it ought to do the trick but I've never actually used this.

The ideal situation for me would be:
* Server enters standby after x minutes of inactivity.
* Server wakes up when another machine attempts to read from a network share.

In practice I expect I'll need to use a 'please wake up' utility but I can live with that.

What I'm really wondering is how much hassle is this likely to be? I don't mind a bit of hassle but I'd rather know in advance so that I can decide whether to attempt it in an evening or set aside half a day at the weekend

Hmph. I'd still be interested in replies but from quick play just now it appears that:

* Neither of the utilities I tried caused it to wake up.
* My server won't properly come of out of standby even manually. It wakes up but then the HDDs and/or Gfx card don't want to play.

It might come out of hybernation successfully but on other machines I've found that this disables wake-on-timer so is likely no good anyway.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Hmph. I'd still be interested in replies...

I take it you know you've posted this is the DSL Techie forum?

I use wake-on-lan to switch my desktop on sometimes. I just send the magic packet containing the MAC address of the desktop.

There seem to be two prerequisites.

1) the motherboard supports wake-on-lan
2) the motherboard has been "powered-down" to the appropriate state.

Hi

The ideal situation for me would be:
* Server enters standby after x minutes of inactivity.
* Server wakes up when another machine attempts to read from a network share.

This normally just means setting the Power settings for the Network Device to wake the computer for any packet.

The problem is if you set the adapter to wake the device for any network access then it will wake quite often with various network traffic finding it's way to the adapter such as broadcast info. It may constantly wake up and be on for most of the time.

Using a magic packet and a small application to wake the server will work much better. Waking the computer from the local network is very easy, I use this software http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/wake-on-lan-gui.a...

Regards

Phil

Thanks for the info on this product.

That link didn't work for me. It seems to be http://www.depicus.com/download.aspx?product=gui for the dowwnload.

Regards,

Felix