Sanity Check for Wake On Lan

[Simon Ryley <simon.ryley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Following on from my previous posts about wake on lan, firstly can I
thank everyone who replied.

I discovered two problems with Wake On Lan in my application.

1) My Netgear router won't support Multicasting, even with the new beta
firmware, and Netgear have no plans to support it.

2) WOL won't work with the motherboard of my media pc when its in
hibernate mode, only when its fully switched off.  Unfortunately when I
switch the media pc off, the GBPVR software can't wake it up to actually
record something....  I could leave the pc on all the time, but this
seems a bit wasteful on power,  and wheres the fun in automating that?

I've come up with plan B, which I would like a little feedback on to
make sure I'm not reinventing the wheel, and spending more that I need to.

The simplest way to wake my media pc from hibernate is to hit the power
button.  Now if I put a cheap networkable Microcontroller in the pc box,
with one of its I/O pins connected to the PC power button, I can wake or
hibernate the pc whenever I want.  If the micro has a webserver built in
and the right website set up,  I can do this from wherever I am in the
world.  As a nice bonus, I can even do a hard reset of the media pc if
it ever locks up.

So, does anyone know of a really simple micro I can buy that will do
just that?  I only need digital IO, a TCP/IP stack and an embedded
webserver.  I don't want a solution that requires programmer hardware,
would much prefer something that can be flashed using the standard
serial port on my pc.

I've used a TINI before for work purposes, but they are a bit expensive
for this job and seem like a bit of an overkill.

All and any suggestions gratefully received.

Regards,

Simon