Turning pc on and off by mobile phone

⋅ Computing, Website ⋅ 0 Comments

Achieving something good today…

I’ve been looking for a way to get access to the files on my PC without wasting power keeping my computer on 24/7. The easiest way to do this is to keep the PC off all the time and find a way of turning it on without being in front of it.

The way I achieved this was by

Turning on Wake on Lan on the computer
Forwarding port 7 on the router to my computer
Installing a PHP script on a webserver that sends a ‘Magic Packet’ that turns on the PC
Slightly modifying the script to ask for a password

And for turning off the computer

Installed Switch Off
Set Switch Off to start as a service
Turn on the web interface of Switch Off
Turn on authentication
Forward the port in Switch Off options to my computer on my router

So I can now grab my mobile phone and, with very little data, type in mywebsite.com/switchon and mywebsite.com/switchoff (obviously the real links are a bit deeper and hidden than that)