I was thinking about the posts I see for people wanting to put together
low power "always on" servers. And thinking about ways to get around the "always on" part.

Got me to wondering if there are home routers that will send a wake up call to the server if it doesn't respond. (Thinking of inbound traffic here - local machines could send their own wake up call to turn on a home server.)
No reason for the server to be on all the time, when the routers have to be on all the time, and usually are low power to start with.

Anything flashed with a 3rd party (linux-based) firmware a la dd-wrt or openwrt should be able to do that. One guide to setting this up is here. As for what routers this would work on, see their hardware compatibility list.

pretty much all the draytek vigor range do this, plus they are a vpn endpoint which is handy for dialling in.

I realize this is an old thread, but I was wondering if anyone has had luck sending magic packets for a WoL over a VPN? If so how did you configure your firewall to not open it up for smurf attack or other vulnerabilities?

I don't know specifically about sending them through a VPN tunnel, but it turns out you can send WOL packets over the internet (without special router firmware). I would expect the same sort of techniques would work inside a tunnel.

This thread has links to more information on remote WOL.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... highlight=

Hope this helps.