Wake On LAN (WoL) Magic Packet Sender Utility

Do you want a small, self-contained utility to remotely wake your computer?  As promised here is a utility you can use to do just that. This small utility offers the following features:

• Wake a computer from a location that is external to the LAN
• Wake a computer from within the LAN
• Automatically store any number of host configurations for repeated use

Follow this guide to ensure your computer is setup correctly for use with WoL. If you are behind NAT or a firewall, ensure the port you specify for each host in the utility is forwarded to the relevant computer. At this point you may be wondering why i chose to write yet another WoL utility when there are already several free alternatives available. The problems i found with existing solutions could be grouped into one or more of the following:

• Many utilities try to send a broadcast packet to the destination host from a location external to the LAN. 99% of consumer routers block these kinds of packets because they are commonly used in hacker attempts - hence the packet never makes it to the host. This utility does not use broadcast packets when sending externally so it does not suffer from this issue
• The inability to wake hosts both externally and internally (broadcast is used internally since IP is not known)
• The inability to save host configurations, requiring the details to be re-entered every time you want to wake a host

This motivated me to write this utility which allowed me to provide all the above functionality. Hopefully you find it useful – feel free to leave a comment if you want something improved or find it useful. Oh and browse the source if you are new to WPF and want to know how to write a simple app. Note that you will need at least the .NET framework 3.5 installed to run this application. This comes included with Windows 7.

Executable

Source Code