WoL, or WakeonLan is the facility to wake a computer from a suspend or sleep mode by sending a magic packet to it via the LAN. Your motherboard must support it and you usually have to configure the BIOS to enable it.
Since my HA PC is in my Node-0 rack and not particularly accessible, WoL is very useful on the occasion when you need to do a really hard reset, when just a Windows restart isn't enough. This is when you suspect some hardware is not behaving. You can shut the machine down using Windows Remote Desktop access and then wake up again using WoL. Of course, power isn't fully removed from the computer, since the motherboard has to be partially powered for the WoL packet to be recognised, but it's as close as you can get without hitting the power switch.
So, anyway, I wanted to send a WoL magic packet and found a really nice little Mac utility to do it: WakeUp.
If you need the same thing for a PC, then the AMD Magic Packet Utility seems popular.
I also found an even nicer Mac program that auto-scans your local network so you don't have to find out the Mac address, and it also has a dashboard widget as well: WakeOnLan. It has scheduled WakeUps as well and seems to have a Sleep button for Mac Os devices too. Really Cool !
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