The other day I asked my father to turn on my Mac back at home so I could grab some files off of it for my job interview. I grabbed the files, and was about to shut the machine back down when I decided that it might be a better idea to try and put it to sleep, and then set up Wake-on-LAN so I could bring it back when I needed it. I installed a VNC server on the machine so I could access the GUI. I found a simple Perl script that takes a MAC address as an argument and send the “Magic Packet” there to wake the machine. I tested this and it worked like a champ.

For the past few days I have been firing up a VNC client to put the Mac back to sleep, since I couldn’t figure out a way to do it from the command-line, but today I found this utility which does exactly that. So now I can wake the machine up and put it back to sleep from the command-line, which is pretty nice.. I wonder if my Mom, who is probably sleeping in my room back home, thinks the machine is possessed?

So that, combined with SSH tunnelling, gives me a secure way to access both my workstation and the webserver running on my TiVo (so I can schedule recordings and review what it has recorded, in case I want to delete any of the programs).