Wake on LAN Magic Packet

by Michael Greifenkamp (March 16th, 2010)

I recently got a new MacPro and was having a problem accessing it from home. The problem was that it was going to sleep and wasn't waking up automatically when I tried to SSH in.

I found a neat way to wake it up, however, using my Fedora Linux server. First I looked up the MAC address of the ethernet card in my MacPro. Then using that number I logged into my Fedora server, which is on the same subnet as my Mac. To wake up the Mac I just type the following:

ether-wake 00:11:22:33:CC:FF

That sends a "magic packet" that will wake up the Mac. Use your own MAC address, of course.

--Mike

--Michael