Wake-on-LAN is a great tool and allows your home PC to seem almost cloud-like. You can switch on your PC without needing to touch it, and have it available when you need it without it using power constantly.

However, there are some drawbacks. It won’t work from a cold-start, that is the first time you power cycle the PC. On some motherboards, it won’t work if you issue a shutdown command, and Windows and Linux can operate differently, even on the same motherboard. It does seem to work well for the suspend modes (S1-S3), but then you’re consuming more power than an S5 soft-off state. Of course, if you suspend and then lose AC power not only can you not restart, it may also corrupt your system.

Then, of course, it’s called wake-on-LAN, not sleep-on-LAN, so there’s no way to turn it off again. “Ah-ha”, you might say, “log on remotely and issue a shutdown command”.

Raspberry Pi Zero W

That’s all possible if your machine hasn’t crashed or frozen, with a kernel panic or just the old-fashioned BSOD. What about a simple reset? These things are taken for granted when you’re physically near the machine.

After years of struggling with variable levels of success with W-O-L, I decided to fix the problem by fitting a second PC inside my home computer. It’s not as silly as it sounds, because of the internet-of-things and the truly amazing work of the Raspberry Pi foundation.

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