I mean, I wouldn’t want it to wake on EVERYTHING. I’d want it to wake for a few protocols, though (80, 443, 23, 3389, and maybe others that I can’t think of). That seems to be the ideal behavior for me. I wouldn’t want the wake the PC every time it was randomly sniffed, just for designated traffic.
MasterP said:
You can’t get a PC to wake on literally any network traffic as that’s not what wake on LAN is designed to do. If it were to wake the machine up when receiving any packet the PC would be asleep for less than a second before being woken up by a broadcast frame or a keepalive frame for a TCP connection. The only way to wake a computer up is by sending a “magic packet” which is a frame that contains a broadcast packet, which instructs routers and switches to send to all LAN ports on the local subnet, and 16 repetitions of the target computer’s MAC address. You’ll need a “server” program to activate this functionality on the target computer and a “client” program to craft the packet needed to wake it up. Windows7 has the “server” functionality built in and there are several websites and utilities you can use to wake it up remotely.
A decent guide:
http://windows7-issues.blogspot.com/2011/03/wake-on-lan-wol-for-windows-7-made-easy.html
Ninja add: It looks like Win7 can wake on any packet, I highly recommend you don’t do this. Your computer will wake up at random times.