Computers are really nice machines, they have amazing processing power and can be used for all sorts of noble purposes, such as storing your movie collection family photos.
Unfortunately, they also have the downside of generating heat and noise, so that’s why I keep one of mine at a friend’s house (also because he has a very fast internet connection). Strangely though, it seems he also isn’t to fond of all that heat and noise and turns the machine off when he thinks I’m not using it. So that’s why I needed a way to send a Wake on LAN signal, known as a magic packet, to remotely start the machine.
Yesterday I wrote a small Haskell program called wol (available on Hackage) to send the “magic packet” to his router. We had to flash his router with new firmware to be able to have it memorize the internal ip address/mac address/port combination, but now it’s working!
I must say, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to write this program. For some time, I was stuck on why the socket wasn’t working. Then I found out I shouldn’t use the PortNum constructor to construct PortNumbers, because the endianess doesn’t match on my machine. It turns out your supposed to use the Num instance of PortNumber and use functions like fromIntegral. I’m happy to see other people also noticed how annoying this is, and are discussing a revamped network package.
Anyway, now you can all start starting your machine remotely with wol (which, to be honest, is just a Haskell port of some PHP script I found online…).