I’m looking for a reliable way to turn my home PC on and off remotely while I’m traveling. I’d like to start it when needed, connect through remote-access software, and shut it down safely afterward.
I’ve heard about Wake-on-LAN and using a smart plug with BIOS power-recovery settings, but I’m unsure which approach would work best.
What hardware, BIOS, and network settings would I need?
Can I turn the PC on from a complete shutdown, or must it remain in sleep mode?
Would I need another device running on my home network?
How can I securely access, shut down, and restart the PC remotely?
What happens if there’s a power outage or the internet connection drops?
Could someone explain a practical setup and help me configure and test it before I travel?
You might want to look into magic packets. These are specialized packets sent from a device like a router or another pc to wake up a pc via the NIC. You’ll need to configure the pc to wake via the bios/uefi settings either through pci-e or the onboard NIC. Even in a situation where the power cuts out completely, as long as the pc receives power, you can power it on using the magic packet from a router or device that supports magic packets.
Alternatively, you can use a remote power on pc device which plugs into a pci-e port and interacts between the pc power switch to the mb jumper. These devices require wifi connectivity and an app install from your phone or tablet.
You will need some device which is always on that you can connect to remotely that will turn your computer on. A raspberry pi or anything like that will work fine. Using Wake on LAN is probably the simplest solution as it doesn’t require any additional hardware. But a smart plug or button pushing robot are also good options, though they still require you to have some device on your network you can connect to to control them remotely. As for shutting down you can just do that with whatever remote access software you plan on using.
If you have an Intel system with AMT, you can use software like MeshCommander, it’s mostly business systems that has this feature.
I’ve used the Shelly Plug S Gen 3 you can control it with a mobile app, and you just need to set the power in the PC BIOS to ‘turn on when power is restored’
I use WoL (Wake on LAN) to turn on my NUC using my router. The NUC hosts some things I’d like to have access too while on the go. And the router runs Wireguard for remote access and a timed script to turn on the NUC.
I have things turned off at night, because I’m not using them and it saves power. But this has been very reliable for me in day to day use.
The trick is needing to already have a device on your network which can send magic packets to use WoL. My router does that (timed or manually), but it kinda depends on what you have running.
The receiving device also needs to have WoL enabled in the UEFI, which almost all systems with an ethernet port have nowadays. But if you have those options, then you don’t need additional devices.
The “professional” or “data-center” way to reliably turn on/off machines is the use of switched PDUs; basically, fancy power strips.
These allow turning on/off outlets one at a time or on a schedule. They have a basic web interface to get started.
A more advanced use case is operating them programmatically (e.g. via SNMP). Turn on outlets event-based. Think operating your computer via HomeAssistant or a CI/CD pipeline.
New, these cost hundreds of dollars, but you can find cheap examples for much less (<$100) on eBay.
Wake-on-LAN can start the PC from a full shutdown, but only with ErP or Deep Sleep turned off in the BIOS. If it runs Windows, also turn off Fast Startup under Power Options and enable Wake on Magic Packet on the network adapter’s Advanced tab in Device Manager.
Set the BIOS AC power recovery option to Power On as well, because on many boards WoL doesn’t respond after a power outage until the PC has booted once.
Before you travel, shut the PC down, unplug it for a minute, plug it back in, and send the magic packet from your phone over the VPN you’ll use on the trip.
for most servers this is a bit brutal, also they have a management controller already.
But for switches and other various paraphenalia yeah PDUs are a thing.
The “home user” version of PDUs are smart power switches. There are a bunch that will contact a cloud server so they will work from the app even when you are out of the local network, but of course that’s horrifying for many people and you might want to have one that is only local and set up a VPN on the phone or laptop so you can maneuver it without relying on cloud.
For this to do anything on a PC you need to set it in BIOS to power on after power loss.
I use Wake on Lan to start my PC remotely. I connect to my router (waves hands) and run it from there.
Once the PC is started, I ssh into the PC and start a wireguard tunnel that only connects to the tunnel itself (AllowedIPs = [tunnel ipv4 range]/24, [tunnel ipv6 range]/64)
Then, once that is started, I turn on a VNC server on my home PC and then connect from my remote computer through the same wireguard tunnel.
The wireguard tunnel is a DIY solution so that I don’t have to have static IPs. My wireguard endpoint has a static IP and both computers connect to it.
It’s probably a little convoluted, but it works for me. The VNC server is not accessible from the internet, except through the tunnel. If you have a static IP, then you don’t really need the wireguard tunnel, but you’ll have to open the ports needed for however you connect to your home PC.
To answer your questions, you would probably need something like a raspberry pi or a router that can run Wake on Lan. If the power goes out, you want to make sure that these restart so that you can regain control.
I think most modern devices support wake on lan, but for my particular setup, I think I had to run a few commands to enable it. I think some computers have BIOS/UEFI options to enable it as well. Wake on lan for me works from either full shutdown or when sleeping, YMMV.
If you are using a raspberry pi, you could also connect the GPIO pins so that the RPI can turn on/reset the PC directly. It’s essentially an electrical version of the remote button pusher, in case that is more to your taste.
