I configured my Windows 8 machine that it listens to magic packages send from other PCs to start it. It works very good. BUT I don't want to explicitly send a magic package, I would rather prefer it if I could send a magic package automatically when I try to access the PC over network.
I tryed using an smbclient event (30803). I configured this event to trigger a command line WOL. But This command will be triggered each time I get this event, no matter which PC I try to reach. I don't want to wake up PC-X when I actually try to access PC-Y.
Is there another way?
This sounds interesting... a possible solution would be, create a windows service and install it on the server or a computer that uses to be up. This service basically would be a network sniffer that captures all tcp traffic in network. It would have a table with ips and MAC addresses (to get MAC from an IP) that should be filled previously with manually or better... from ARP table (I did a program that gets IP / MAC from ARP table but has its issues... so each machine plugged on the LAN will get its MAC / IP), also this service would have last date ping done to each IP.
Then... how it would work... the service would capture all TCP packets and make a list of distinct IP, then each second or two get all distinct IPs (this will guarantee that the service is not consuming a lot of system resources), and on each distinct ip check last ping: if last ping was done successfully in last 5 or 10 minutes nothing is done (machine is guessed up), if no ping done or success in 5-10 minutes a ping is made. Based on ping response... if the machine is not responging magic packet is sent to MAC (provided from ARP when machine is up or manually as commented before). If ping responds nothing is done. Ping result and date is stored to avoid pings to all machines every time. Instead of ping also its possible to do it reading ARP table.
I this approach, system resources are preserved, and pings are made with sense, also magic packets are not sent if machine is up or guessed up.
Note that firewall should allow ICMP.