I prefer working from my office in my house.  It’s a million times more comfortable for me and I fill at least a thousand times more productive there than I do anywhere else.

However, on-site happens and when it does I need to be able to access my stuff.  To make that happen I setup a RaspberryPi to host OpenVPN.  So far this has been great.  However, today when I tried to jump on one of my VMs to do some work I couldn’t get in.  VPN was working fine, I just couldn’t RDP to my VM.  After looking around I found out that my physical workstation had gone to sleep.  DOH!

My daughter is home, she is doing an online school (like father like daughter I guess), so I could call her.  But first I wanted to see if there was a better solution.  It turns out “Wake On Lan” is a thing and is turned on by default for Windows 10 (something I need to look in to – is this a good thing?).

After a little research I figured out that Raspbian has a package for this.  I just needed the MAC address for my physical machine.  A quick SSH to my Raspberry and no more problem:

sudo apt-get install wakeonlan
wakeonlan this:is:not:my:mac:address

A quick refresh on my network status page and my workstation is back!

I’m still trying to work out DNS issues b/c I don’t have name resolution for my home network.  I have to use my network status page to get IP addresses.  Not a big deal and I’ve configured my router to reserve the addresses so I can just use my hosts file.  But a DNS server would be cooler.  My tomorrow.