Pisten

Pisten (Pi + Listen) is a simple port listener that will forward valid wake-on-lan packets to the broadcast IP address. Pisten is best suited for use on always-on, low-power devices, such as the Raspberry Pi.

Some routers do not allow port forwarding to the broadcast IP address which necessitates the use of this program. Also, it is generally safer to filter out unwanted packets before forwarding to the broadcast IP.

Installation

You can install pisten as a python package:

python3 -m pip install pisten

Or you can clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/davidpratt512/pisten

Usage

On linux, you can use

nohup pisten &

to run the server. By default, the server listens on port 1729 and forwards to 255.255.255.255:9.

You can specify what port to listen to and what IP address/port to forward to:

pisten -L 3141 -F 0 -I 127.127.127.127

In this case, we are (-L)istening on port 3141, (-F)orwarding to port 0 and (-I)P address 127.127.127.127.

Set up port forwarding

All routers can be configured to forward packets from specific ports to specific devices on your network. You will want to forward a public UDP port of your choice to port 1729 (or whatever port you specify) of the IP address of your server. You may want to consider creating a DHCP reservation for your server as well.