Setting up WOL for PC

Question

My goal is to be able to wake my PC up remotely. So I did the following:
1) Running Windows 8 so turned off my firewall
2) Went into my LAN properties and enabled WOL
3) Went into BIOS and checked all the wake options under power management

I used depicus' WOL monitor port 9 to see if I'm getting any connections. Using Mocha WOL app for the iPhone, I first tried WOLing while connected to my home network and Depicus' said it received it, great. But my main goal is WOL from anywhere. So I turned off WiFi for my iPhone and tried to WOL using the following settings:
IP: 209.189.XXX.XXX (got this from googleing "what is my ip")
MAC Address: 00-0F-XX-XX-XX-XX
WOL Port: 9

Tried to Wake up, Depicus' monitor received nothing. Okay, fine. Then I went to depicus' WOL website and entered the same settings:
Mac Address: Same above
IP: Same as above
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.255 (not sure but saw on some forum that you have to use this for remote wol)
Port: 9

Still no luck. I live in an apartment so all I have is a router. Went to the router page and tried to forward port 9. Looks like this:

But I have no idea what to put for the "To IP Address" field. And the address is 192.168.1.X so i don't even think this is going to do anything since I can't use local ip.

Any ideas on how to get this to work?

Answer 1

Ok. The screenshot of your port forwarding page shows you were working in the correct direction. What you need to do is determine which internal IP address is being assigned to your computer by your router. However... since this address can be different if you allow the router to assign it randomly, what you need to do is tell the router what internal IP address you want for your computer EVERY time, and then assign that address in the port forwarding page.

Whaat? Huh? lol.

Ok. Click the Setup, on your router Admin page there. You will see the button for DHCP reservation table. Once it opens, look at the table of the currently connected computers by their name and MAC address. There, on that table, you can tell the router to assign a specific internal IP address to your computer. Say... 192.168.1.101 and why that? Well, you'll probably never connect 100 computers to your router.

Now, by using the DHCP reservation table, you ensure that every time you start your computer, it gets the address of 192.168.1.101 and this is important, because now when you go over to the port forwarding tab, you can put a 101 in that one box you can change.... you know, the box that currently has a 0 in it. This way, you are telling the router to forward all traffic on port 9, to the computer at 192.168.1.101.... which is the internal IP address you assigned to your computer in the DHCP reservation table.

Follow?

Answer 2

The reason you need port forwarding when trying to do this from outside your local area network (LAN) is that you need to connect to your router, which then redirects the message to your computer.

The IP address you're getting from whatever website you use is the IP address of the router. In other words, right now, you're sending a message to your router, but your router has no idea where to send that. That's where the port forwarding comes in.

Your computer has it's own internal LAN address (as does your iPhone when it's on your wireless), and you need to tell your router to send the message to that system. Your router is configured to use 192.168.1.* address on the intranet/LAN side, which is why the port forwarding dialog has that filled in for you already. So, how do you get your computers IP address? Easiest way I know of is:

1. Enter 'cmd' in the Start screen to launch a command prompt
2. Type ipconfig and press enter - you should see a line that starts "IPv4 Address" and that should be a 192.168.1.* address.

Take that address and enter it into the port forwarding form you've shown in your screen shoot, save and apply the changes.

The way you've got it set up right now, the messages are getting forwarded, to a system with the address of 192.168.1.0, which is technically an invalid address, so the WOL message that you're trying to send is probably being sent nowhere. Change it to point to your Win8 system, and you should be good to go.

Answer 3

If it were me, I'd flash the router with DD-WRT firmware and use the built-in WOL features in the admin console to wake up the machines.

DD-WRT Site