Solaris

I'd like to use SPARC Solaris10 to 'wake up' an old PC on same LAN.
what is the simplest way of doing it? (preferably without installing new software)

thanks.

Firstly the PC (BIOS) motherboard must support wake on lan.

Once enable in the BIOS it should be fairly simple.

You send the sleeping system (or even powered down system if it has volts supplied) a magic packet. The magic packet can come from anywhere. I've sent a magic packet to my system at home from the office by using NAT and port forwarding on my router at home.

There are a number of magic packet generators available for download free on the internet. Obviously you need to select one that works on your O/S.
Just Google something like "magic packet generator".

Does that help? Or am I telling you stuff that you already know?

thanks. I've managed to wake it from Linux with 'etherwake'. On Solaris, I'd like to use 'telnet' or similar, to avoid installing anything. is this possible?

You can't telnet to a machine that's asleep. Incidental traffic to a "wrong" machine won't work either, a modern switched network won't repeat it to anything else. Only broadcasts go to everyone.

So it pretty much has to be a connectionless broadcast -- UDP or ICMP. But ping won't let you shoehorn in the magic sequence, so that's out.

How about a perl script?

http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/jpo/software/wakeonlan/

thanks, I'll try perl. I've seen (on some forum), people use this on linux (for different purpose): could something similar be used?

To repeat:

1) You can't make TCP connections to a machine that's asleep.

2) You can't even aim at a machine that's asleep -- by definition, it doesn't have an IP yet.

Things like telnet, ftp, etc mostly use TCP connections, which depend on the machine being awake to respond. UDP is more like ping, where it just gets sent no matter what.

But it takes a very specific kind of UDP packet to reach a sleeping machine: A broadcast UDP packet. It has to be a broadcast because, without an IP, you have no way to "aim" the packet at anyone. I don't think writing to the broadcast address is enough these days, it has to be sent with the special BROADCAST flag. So that rules out /dev/udp tricks as well. Lots of shells don't even have /dev/udp -- despite the name, there is no /dev/udp, that's a shell extension in a few specific versions of KSH and BASH.

Furthermore, a magic packet is going to be difficult to craft in a shell. Shells aren't equipped to deal with binary data. You'd have to worry about which version of what shell everyone has to have any hope -- it wouldn't be portable.

Too bad there's not a well-known scripting language which supports networking, binary strings, and is installed everywhere you go -- like perl...