Wake-on-lan trigger device for my office PC -- using OpenWRT?

[Matthew Gillen]

Brendan Kidwell wrote:
> Do you have any real experience waking up a host that is in "stanbdy" state,
> without using wake-on-lan? I was reading about wake-on-lan, and it seems
> some motherboards/NICs support keeping some kind of live TCP/IP stack online
> while the rest of the host is asleep, and responding to wakeup requests that
> way. I doubt mine can do anything like that.
> 
> So from the point of view of remotely switching back to "on" state,
> "standby" and "powered off" seem to be equivalent. (Assuming you've setup
> your hardware with "wake-on-lan available while powered off" set to true.)

Reading that made me imagine a Rube Goldberg machine for waking up a machine
from standby that doesn't support WoL.  The gist of it was using
IP-over-carrier-pidgon to send a WoL packet to a drop-box at the office.  The
weight of the paper that the packet was printed on would trigger a series of
mechanical eccentricities to send a message across the office, ultimately
ending in a robotic hand that jiggles the mouse (or taps the keyboard),
thereby waking the machine up from standby  (even better if it was a laptop
that needed to be opened); all of which together would cost orders of
magnitude more than just upgrading the workstation in question.

Matt