[apostacy]

in system preferences
'energy saver' panel
options tab

wake on network administration access

does the above option really work? it doesn't work for me whenever i ssh or sftp into a sleeping computer (ssh/sftp either "times out" or says there's no available connection)

[Theodour]

Likewise. This has never worked for me either ... under any iteration of OS X, I believe.

[ginoledesma]

Selecting the "Wake for network administrative access" option configures the Mac to listen for a special "wake up" packet to bring it out of sleep. This feature is commonly called Wake-On-LAN (WOL), or sometimes AMD Magic Packet.

ssh, sftp, telnet, and the like are regular applications that communicate over TCP/IP. They'll complain about a timeout error or connection refused because the other machine won't respond to their requests (which are "regular" requests).

To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a bundled tool with Mac OS X that can send this special packet. Apple Remote Desktop, Macintosh Manager, or Network Assistant may have that feature, but I can't be sure.

The good news: there are a couple of programs you can use on Mac OS X to wake up another Mac: WakeUp and Wake550.

On Linux, you can get a variety of programs, such as wakeonlan, ether-wake, wakelan, WOL Utilities, and the other tools mentioned on the WOL-Mini-HOWTO.

For Windows, just do a search -- there are lots of them. That way, you'll be able to wake your Mac up from sleep no matter what computer you're on, then use something like ssh to remotely access it.