Re: Re: Shares on sleeping MacOS X machines

Wake on LAN (with the OS X apps Wake550 or WakeUp) works on my LAN with Macs
and PCs (Windows, Linux). I didn't try it over the internet so far.

What I miss is a "wake on network access" mode. Why? I'd like the idea of
having a central storage for music, pictures and some other kind of files
accessible from several Macs and other clients (e.g. Soundbridge). Prices of
consumer NAS devices are dropping constantly, so they are now quite an
interesting solution for this request. They are easy to install, low power
consuming (some even without a fan and automatic power down/up of the
harddrive on access), but at least the cheaper ones have low transfer rates
(2 MB/s on a 100MBit  Network) and no AFP support (SMP/NFS on OS X works but
is a little bit ugly; no file creation dates preserved f.e.). And with the
strong binding of Soundbridge to iTunes, they are no option at all to serve
your music library to the Soundbridge. Probably a lot of us have an old G3
or G4 Powermac, which would happily do a good job as a file server and music
server (by running iTunes in shared mode). Its free (if you own it already
but don't use it any more), has latest AFP, can run iTunes  - perfect, but
you must have it running 24h/day or every Mac/client, that wants to access
it, has to cast his WOL magic packet spell first. That is at least tedious
and can be tricky/impossible on clients you cannot control via scripts, like
the Soundbridge.

In good old OS 9 there were two wake up checkboxes in the energy control
panel, "wake on administrative network access" and "wake on network access".
The second one has vanished with OS X. Don't know what "wake on network
access" really did. I never tried it and I can't find any information on
Apple support about that option. Probably it was added for future Macs, that
never made it to release state.

Well, a more academic discussion, as I don't want to deal with OS 9 any
more, especially not for any kind of file sharing, which is really slow on
OS 9 in compare to OS X. But if the hardware of late OS 9 Macs would be able
to wake on simple network access (without sending the magic string for WOL),
it should be possible to add such an option with some  kind of 3rd party app
to OS X as well. Didn't find such an app so far, but if someone steps over
one, it would be nice to share that information with us.

Another idea would be using an ethernet/USB device (kind of switch), that
listens for network access requests to the sleeping Mac and, in case there
are any, wakes the Mac via the USB port (or via WOL). That device probably
could send some initial information back to the requesting machine to
prevent a timeout. Someone should invent this device in case it doesn't
exist yet ;-)

--Peter