Computers that support the Wake-on-LAN (WoL or WOL) standard can be awoken from a sleep state by sending a "magic packet" to their network card from another system. For an Ethernet card, the packet is an Ethernet frame that is sent to all systems on the local area network (LAN). The packet contains 6 bytes of the hexadecimal value FF followed by 16 repetitions of the 48-bit media access control (MAC) address of the system to be awakened from a sleep state. I tried unsuccessfully on Friday to remotely "wake" a Dell PC from another PC by connecting to the other PC on the same LAN and then sending a magic packet to the sleeping computer using the Wake-on-LAN program from www.matcode.com—I no longer see a download link for the free software for Windows systems on the developer's website, but you can download it from a snapshot of the site taken by the Wayback Machine on December 19, 2007 at Wake-on-LAN where you can also find the utility MCGETMAC.EXE that will allow you to obtain the MAC address for a network interface card (NIC) on another computer, or you can download WakeMeOnLan, another free program for Windows systems created by Nir Sofer. After the user powered on her Dell computer this morning and left the office, I connected to her system remotely to verify that the system is configured to respond to a magic packet to wake it when it is sleeping.
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