PVR Scheduler: Wake your HTPC on the web (1 Viewer)

[STSC]

Hi,

I would like to know if I should implement a feature that your HTPC gets waked up over the internet.

Requirements:
- A network card that supports Wake On Lan (WOL)
- Your computer needs to supports Wake-On-Lan (almost every newer PC does that)
- A router that supports Wake-On-Lan (WOL), e.g. AVM FritzBox, Linksys WRT54GS

It would work like this:
- PVR Scheduler would send the recording time to the PVR Scheduler Server.
- PVR Scheduler calls a script at that time to wake up your HTPC.

Please let me know if you are interested in this?

 

[mzemina]

What feature I'd be looking for (instead of the wake on LAN feature you are proposing) would be web control but I wouldn't need to have apache web server running on the HTPC but on my linux server. The reason is my router only allows one computer to be on the DMZ (accessable outside the router to the internet) and I would much rather that be a standalone linux machine which would have less tendancies of getting virus/worm/trojan/etc.

Mike

 

[Ralph]

Hi STSC,

yes, keep on working on that.
The possibility to wake up my computer over internet for recordings would be great.

Though I still have some problems with PVRS i like this program/plugin very much.

Regards
Ralph

 

[htpcoz]

I've been able to put this together to some extent, although I've not finished the last bit to tie it all together.

I'm running an ASUS P4P800-VM MB with the internal LAN connected. I've configured this using PowerScheduler and the BIOS is configured for an S3 suspend. The system will S3 suspend after a period of time, and will wake on a number of situations;

1) a scheduled job (scheduled task or scheduled recording) comes eligible to run
2) I press the PC on button on the MCE remote
3) I send the PC a magic packet.

I had to get the latest Intel Proset driver for this to work (previously the system would constantly wake up, as I think the network driver was waking up on any traffic).

Now, how do we get it to wake up??

I've got a Linksys WRT54GS, and am running the latest Alchemy firmware from Sveasoft. This provides many features, one of which is the firmware includes the 'wol' exe, which I can telnet into the router to execute. When I do, it will successfully wake the PC. So the webscheduler interface is available (from the internet via port forwarding).

The problem here is that I don't want to expose the telnet interface to the internet to have to run the wol command. So I have been looking at using the web browser that comes with the 'batbox' distribution for the WRT54G, which includes a lightweight CGI compatible HTTP server, tweaking the firewall parameters to open the local HTTP port for remote access.

This would allow the following flow;

1) Internet client connects to port 80 (or some other special port for security)
2) The HTTP server on the router, this runs a CGI script automatically which includes the wol command to wake the server
3) The HTTP server delays for a sort period
4) The HTTP server redirects the browser to a new port (eg. 81) which is forwarded to the Web Scheduler on the MP box

The main things to be done here is ;

1)to get the batbox http server extracted and running on the router.
2) Write the web pages and CGI scripts to run the wol and redirect the browser.
3) rebuild the alchemy distro to include the above components automatically
or 4) build an RC script that can bootstrap components 1) and 2) from a TFTP server each time the router boots (router filesystem is not persistent, only the core OS and some of the configuration eg. rc scripts).

Then again, maybe there is an easier way

I still however do have some problems with the PowerScheduler sometimes not properly going to sleep, and sometimes missing recordings. This is very intermittent, so for the moment I'm just leaving the PC running with the video and HD stopped through normal power management.