How to wake your gaming PC or home server with an iPhone

Why this is worth setting up

A PC that only hosts your game server has no real reason to run around the clock. Let it sleep or shut down fully, then switch it back on from the sofa the moment your group actually wants to play, and check the server came up fine with RCON or SSH. Quieter room, smaller power bill, nothing lost.

What the PC itself needs first

The app can only ever send the wake-up signal. Whether the PC actually reacts comes down to its own settings, and these you only have to change the once:

• In the BIOS or UEFI, dig up the option usually labelled Wake on LAN, Power On by PCI-E or Resume by LAN, and turn it on.
• In the network adapter settings inside the OS, let the device wake the computer, and on Windows, flip on the magic packet option too.
• Stick to a wired Ethernet connection. Most PCs simply will not wake over Wi-Fi from a full shutdown, no matter what the adapter settings claim.
• Write the adapter's MAC address down somewhere, pull it from ipconfig /all on Windows or ip link on Linux.

Sending the actual wake-up

1. On Servers, tap the terminal button in the top bar and choose Wake-on-LAN under Tools.
2. Under Wake Device, give it a Device Name (optional), Game PC works fine.
3. Type the MAC address into the MAC Address (AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF) field, colons and all.
4. Leave Broadcast IP at 255.255.255.255, or swap in your own network's broadcast address, 192.168.1.255 for instance.
5. Tap Wake to fire the packet right now, or Save to keep the device under Saved Devices for next time.
6. Check the Log underneath: it confirms the packet actually went out to the broadcast address on port 9.

What is actually in that packet

The wake-up signal is a fixed pattern that network cards keep listening for even with the computer fully off. It is built from the MAC address alone and nothing else, so there is no secret hiding in it anywhere.

The app fires those 102 bytes out as a UDP broadcast, every device on the network receives the same packet, and only the one card with a matching MAC address actually wakes up.

Common reasons it does not wake the first time

• The phone sitting on a different network is a common mistake. A broadcast never crosses routers or the internet; your iPhone has to share the exact home network with the PC, mobile data will not reach it at all.
• Local Network access switched off is the next usual culprit. Declined it once? Turn it back on for RCON in the iOS Settings app.
• The PC got unplugged or lost power at some point. Plenty of motherboards only honour Wake-on-LAN after a clean shutdown with power still physically connected.
• Guest Wi-Fi isolation is an easy one to miss. Some routers flatly stop devices on the guest network from reaching the main one at all.

Waking it when you are not home

The app sends its packet from the phone straight to the local broadcast address, which is really a tool built for use at home. Waking a PC from anywhere else usually means extra setup on your network first, a VPN back into the home network being the common one, so your phone behaves as though it never left.

Questions and answers

You might also like

• How to check if your game server's port is open from your phone · RCON

More RCON guides

• How to use RCON on a Minecraft server with the RCON app
• Rust RCON on your phone: connect and run admin commands
• How to SSH into your game server from an iPhone
• How to browse your game server's files with an FTP client on iPhone
• How to check if your game server's port is open from your phone
• How to schedule a Minecraft server restart with warnings and a save
• Why does Minecraft RCON say connection refused, and how to fix it
• All questions about RCON
• Back to RCON