Wake-On-Lan - Behind Two Routers

So here is my current network setup: There is a central 'Cisco' router for the apartment. I connect wirelessly using an old router of mine (WRT54Gv2) with DD-WRT installed as a client to the central wireless network.

My router, using DD-WRT, supports dynamic dns and the like (and I'm open to that solution).

So, I would like to send a magic packet to my client router (or to the central router, if that isn't messy) to wake up my computer remotely, so that I can access it when I'm not at home.

I have an ASROCK|P67 EXTREME4 motherboard with support for Wake-On-Lan. The computer would automatically boot into an Ubuntu 11.10 that I would tunnel into using ssh or for graphical usage something like VNC.


WOL packets need to be issued from the network the machine to be woken is on. They are sent to a MAC address and so cannot be routed across networks - they cannot be forwarded by routers from one network to another. Is the dd-wrt router on the same network as the PC?

If so, you could issue the wol packet from the dd-wrt router


Wake-On-Lan packets cannot be routed (they work on local network only, routers won't pass them through.

However, according to Wikipedia article on Wake-on-LAN, there is such thing as "Subnet Directed Broadcasts", which, if supported by all routers along the path and by the target computer, could be used to send WOL packet across the router boundary. I highly doubt it.