Remotely controlling a PC

Question

Okay after a lot of hairpulling and googling around I've not been able to make this work as I want.

Operating system involved is Windows 7 Ultimate on both the laptop and desktop.

I'll be travelling to a different city for a few months and will be using a laptop for the said period. I have a desktop at my home which I want to remotely connect to.

What I want to do is as follows:

1. Startup up desktop remotely from its s3 or s5 power state
2. Wait for windows to boot
3. Login to windows and do my work (I will not have anyone physically present to type in the password and then walk away)
4. Shutdown/Restart and repeat

I've tried Remote Desktop connection (RDC). It works successfully on LAN (when the laptop and desktop are connected to the same router) but not when these two use different internet connections. RDC + VPN like Hamachi works but it assumes that windows is always logged in and hamachi is running on the destkop totally defeating my aim of achieving the above workflow.

Wake-on LAN is working over LAN but not over WAN (when the laptop and desktop are connected to the internet using two separate devices and ip addresses i.e. they are effectively on distinct networks).

Can anyone help? If anyone knows how to pull this off on Linux (esp ubuntu) I'd be okay with that too!

Answer 1

The Problem lies in the fact that the WOL Function relies on an Ethernet Broadcast which solely goes by a MAC-Address (OSI Layer 2), not an IP (Layer 3).

Trying to do this through a VPN-Connection will usually go wrong, with the following settings you can get around this:

Setup Port-Forwarding in your Router with UDP Port 9 (WOL Layer 3 Pakets usually go by this port) on your local machine - don't forget to set static IP's since DHCP will jumble things up (eventually) also be careful, if you do have a dhcp range you want to keep alive, set static IP's outside this range.