Wake-on-Magic-Packet, WOMP is pretty much Wake-on-LAN. Essentially, WOMP allows a network interface to be active even when the computer is asleep. Then, when it gets a specially formatted packet, which we call the magic packet (’cause turning something on when it’s sleeping without hitting a button is pretty cool, right?!?!) can be sent to the IP of the system to fire it up. The magic packet is a packet where the packet payload consists of 6 bytes worth of ones in a row followed by the computers MAC address repeated 16 times.
You can enable WOMP for OS X using the Options tab of the Energy System Preference pane.
Simply check the box for “Wake for Ethernet network administrator access” and you’ve enabled Wake-on-LAN. Now, if you prefer to do so from the command line, you can enable WOMP using the pmset utility as follows (which enables womp for all Ethernet interfaces, btw):
pmset -a womp 1
Then you can use a program such as this one, aptly named WakeonLAN to fire your systems up when they’re asleep. One thing I really like about using a technology such as womp is that it has the potential to conserve a lot of power. For example, if you have 5,000 computers on your corporate (or educational) campus) and you want to back all of them up nightly (OK, I know it’s silly but just work with me here). Well, you wouldn’t want to let them all run for a few hours without going to sleep, just so you can back them up. Using magic packets could conserve a lot of power give the uses. Used in conjunction with other automations it could also provide new strategies that you might not have otherwise thought of.
One critique is that womp is not exactly very secure. There’s no password required by default and it operates at Layer 2 (Data Link) so it’s not really secure. You can implement a password if you have a NIC that supports SecureOn. I haven’t been able to get that to work with OS X yet, but I have used it with other OSen in the past. Also, there’s a TLS implementation in the Intel vPro’s. Haven’t gotten my grubby hands on one of those to dink around with yet though, so more on that later (maybe).