I quickly realized that when I tried to remote desktop into it, if the computer was asleep it wouldn't connect (duh). I then modified the network interface settings to Wake-on-LAN and enhanced the security a bit by only waking on a "magic packet".
Then I wrote a interface where I can visit a web page and send the "magic packet" to my computer in order to wake it up. I won't go into the whole interface, but the code below demonstrates how to send the "magic packet" from C#. See the wiki article on details about what the "magic packet" is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN
Also, don't forget to open any inbound or outbound ports on your firewall!
private void SendMagicPacket(string destinationHost, int destinationPort)
{
// the header frame of 6 bytes of 255
List<byte> datagram = new List<byte> { 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF };
// load the mac address (for demo purposes, set it to zeros)
byte[] macAddress = new byte[] { 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00 };
// 16 sequences of the MAC address
for (int i = 0; i < 16; ++i)
{
datagram.AddRange(macAddress);
}
//
// you don't have to do both below, but both are shown
//
// send directly to an IP address
using (UdpClient client = new UdpClient())
{
client.Connect(destinationHost, destinationPort);
client.Send(datagram.ToArray(), datagram.Count);
}
// broadcast it
using (UdpClient client = new UdpClient())
{
client.Connect(IPAddress.Broadcast, destinationPort);
client.Send(datagram.ToArray(), datagram.Count);
}
}
