On Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:32:17 -0800, RickH wrote:
I ordered one to do remote power-up / boot-up of other computers in
the home. Computers that I occasionally need to get to over the
Internet (to copy files from work etc) but dont want to leave running
all day (for network and power reasons).

Hmm, I used to ssh to my router/firewall and from there send a
wake-on-LAN command to whatever it was I was powering up (I possibly could
have got the router/firewall to forward the necessary voodoo for me and
just issue the wake-up from whatever remote machine I was on, but I never
quite got around to seeing if that would work).

For shutdown I'd just ssh into whatever machine I had on and issue a
normal poweroff, same as normal (analogous to your mention of using
Windows' remote desktop to do this).

These days my main server's just left on all the time, so for other "home
monitoring" tasks I'm just looking for some form of digital I/O
board that I can hook sensors to...

cheers

Jules