On or around September 15th of this year, the powers that be at my work place disabled IMAP and POP access on the “lab” network that our bench machines (completely unlocked for testing purposes) are attached to. Since then, I had become frustrated with using webmail to access my personal email and set about finding a workaround. VNC is an obvious solution and work beautifully after I set my router to forward ports 5800-5810 and 5900 through 5910 to my computer.
Enter the Complications
My computer, out of the box, liked to go into standby mode after a short period of time. Since I pay for my electricity, and the time to wake up from standby is just a few seconds, I’m okay with this. The problem is that the computer has to be on for VNC to detect the incoming connection. I decided to try out Wake On Lan, which has existed for as long as I can remember using computers, but something I’ve never worked with. I opened up port 7 on my router and downloaded a nifty little windows WOL utility from depicus.com. For reference, I use the MAC of my computer, the internet IP address of my router and 255.255.255.255 as a subnet mask when sending out magic packets.
WOL seems to work erratically. Most of the time, I send the packet, wait 15 seconds and then I can VNC in. I can then shut down the computer, send the packet again, and VNC in again. But some days I send the packet and can’t VNC in and I have no idea why. Everything seems okay when I get back home. It’s as if the magic packet was never sent. For now, I’ve been leaving the computer on when I head to work and then shutting it off remotely when I’m done with it. But if anyone has any suggestions, I’d like to get things working consistantly.
Comments
2 responses to “Wake On LAN”
try changing the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0
Did you check your SMTP settings? I think they might be pooched.