for keeping track of my digital experiments

I managed to get a few computers in the past week, just in time for my spring break. I transferred my XP Home license onto one of them. I then stuck a 128mb GPU I had, and enough ram into the 1.6ghz computer, I snagged from recycling intentions, to run pc Halo. I then plugged in a playstation 2 controller into this pc by means of an adapter I had purchased from a Hong Kong EBay shop. I hooked a S-Video cable into my graphics card instead of to a VGA cable and jacked into my tv. The graphics need to be tweaked a bit to display just right, but it worked great for a trial run.

The setup in picture form

Halo for PC gameplay on a TV

Well I have a computer cluster in my Zamboni room. It is a pain booting up these semi-hidden machines. After getting a few more computers, as the result of tedious negotiations, it became high time to find a solution to this problem. Essentially, as long as said computer is plugged into a live ethernet hookup, it is possible to boot the computer when BIOS settings allow Wake-On-LAN. [more info on Wikipedia]

I continued poking around my google search results and found a website that runs a PHP implementation of the wake on lan protocol, called remotewakeup.com. If you setup your router properly, I guess you can wake a machine from any remote location. I also found some PHP source code that is probably what remotewakeup.com is running. Check it out at phrackattack.net. There are plenty of implementations available based upon the WOL rfc. A java implementation I found –> http://www.moldaner.de/wakeonlan/wakeonlan.html.

[Added April 5th] I was working with Debian a lot and I found some information on implementing a remote wakeup for Debian/Ubuntu systems.