I've done searches through the web and was unable to find the answer to this question. Hopefully, someone here will have an answer.
I have a server with all my movie files and I would like to share them with other computers on my network. The other computers would mount network shares on their computer in order to access the server. However, the server is not accessed most of the times since it is a home server and I would like it to go to sleep when not in use. I could enable Wake-On-Lan, but that would require an extra step of sending a magic packet. I would like the server to wake when someone attempts to access one of the network shares.
There is the option of waking on ping, which would wake the server whenever there is any attempted communication. This is probably the path I want to take. However, with this option on the server wakes after just two minutes of going to sleep and does not go back to sleep. After reading a lot of threads on the web, it seems the router is doing an arp refresh (not sure if that's the right terminology). The router is asking "who has this ip address" and it hits all the computers on the network, which wakes the server. The router does this like every 2 minutes. Some people online have said that they got wake on ping to work properly but those were old threads and I couldn't get any answers.
Anyway, I've tried assigning static IPs on the network, shutdown the dhcp server, and bought a new router. Computer is still waking up shortly after going to sleep. I read somewhere that you can edit the arp table so that it doesn't bother the computer, but I'm not sure if that's possible since I have found no documentation of editing arp tables on routers.
Does anyone know if and how this can be done? Any response would be useful thanks.
BTW, I'm running Win7 Ultimate. Was using Dlink DIR-655. Tried using a Netgear WNDR3700. Everything is running via ethernet.