Remote Wake from Sleep over Internet

[Spikey115]

I'm trying to set up a simple way to wake my iMac from sleep over the internet. I've come across http://www.rshut.com/products/wol i've set up everything and it works...well...sort of:

The iMac is connected to an airport extreme base station. This method works perfectly fine while testing; I put my mac to sleep, then remote wake it with my macbook from a remote location. The problem comes when my iMac has been in sleep mode for a long time. If I let my iMac sleep overnight and then attempt to wake it remotely, it will not work. I can manually wake it and then try it again and it works. I suspect it has something to do with my airport base station. Any ideas as to what the problem might be? I've set the DHCP to lease IP addresses for 4 days with no luck. I would appreciate any information that would allow me to use the website above when my iMac is sleeping for a long time. Thank you.

 

[operator207]

I had issues with WOL apps before. Sometimes I had to "spam" the remote machine for a few minutes to get it to wake.

 

[mnkeybsness]

I'm not that experienced with this, though I would guess that this is an issue of OS X's "deep sleep" mode. After some amount of time in sleep mode, OS X writes the computer's state to disk and almost completely powers down, saving more energy than in normal sleep mode. It's possible that there isn't power running to anything anymore that would allow you to wake on lan.

Keep in mind, this is just a guess.

 

[Spikey115]

It is very weird because I'm able to wake my iMac over my home network using the wake-on-lan application even if it's been in sleep mode for many hours. It just won't work over the internet. I still thing it has to do with my Airport Extreme not forwarding the magic packet broadcast to the iMac. Does anybody know if Apple Remote Desktop or other applications would be able to do what i'm looking for?

 

[Amdahl]

The ARP entry is probably being expired out of the network switch or base station. ARP ties an IP address to a ethernet MAC address. Sometimes you can hardwire an ARP entry or MAC address to a particular port. Or you can try Proxy ARP.

Given the situation though and the parts you have, you're probably out of luck.