Automatically wake W7 PC for fileshares/remote desktop/etc without "magic packet"

Question

I'd like to store all my media (photos/images/videos/music) on a shared network drive on my media PC (hooked up to the TV, it's not often used) for everyone in my home to use, however I'm edgy about leaving it on 24/7 so people can access it.

I tried disabling the "Only allow a magic packet to wake this computer" check box so it would respond to network traffic, but it seems my router (or something on the network) wakes the computer back up almost immediately. powercfg confirms this, is there a way to find a balance here without having to manually send a magic packet? I'd prefer it if it turned on for traffic, but that doesn't seem to be doable with the E3000 router I have.

Would it be more worthwhile to just let it run all the time? It is just a P4 stripped down to the motherboard and hard drives, but I'd prefer it went to sleep when it wasn't working, which to be fair is 90%+ of the day...

Answer 1

If you disable "only allow magic packet" then any traffic at all will wake the computer, and networks will have chatty packets flying around no matter what.

So you'll have to control what packets actually land on the interface that can trigger the wakeup. Something like a firewall in between the router and the server that only permitted targetted packets through to the server - so no broadcasts. If there are other Windows machines on the network they might try to contact it directly too, so tuning the rules may take some trial and error - block ports 139/tcp 137/udp and 137/tcp.

The firewall needn't be complex, if you have an old router lying around that has wan/lan interfaces, you could install dd-wrt or similar on it and set up the firewall rules with it.

This would add an extra routing hop in your network though which increases the complexity you have to deal with.

The other thing you might consider is lots of bios's will support a wake up at a specific time. So if there are times of day (such as night) where the PC is always off, then you could schedule a suspend in Windows, and a wake-up in the morning via the bios. The wakeup time can often be set from Windows with the right utility, which means you can have different wake/sleep schedules on different days.