WakeBridge

Wake your sleeping PC over Wi-Fi through an old phone on Tailscale, then jump straight into RDP.

A small Windows tray app built with Tauri 2. It lists the devices on your tailnet, and when the PC you want is asleep, it asks a bridge device at home to wake it up.

Independent project, not affiliated with Tailscale Inc. Tailscale is a trademark of Tailscale Inc.

flowchart LR
    subgraph away["Anywhere: 4G, hotspot, office"]
        laptop["💻 Laptop<br/>WakeBridge"]
    end
    subgraph home["Home Wi-Fi"]
        bridge["📱 Bridge<br/>old Android, Termux sshd"]
        pc["🖥️ PC<br/>sleeping (S3)"]
    end
    laptop -- "① SSH over Tailscale" --> bridge
    bridge -- "② magic packet<br/>Wi-Fi broadcast" --> pc
    laptop == "③ RDP over Tailscale<br/>once port 3389 answers" ==> pc

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Why

Wake-on-LAN is a link-layer broadcast: it never leaves your home network, and Tailscale (which works at the IP layer) can't carry it. A sleeping PC is also offline on Tailscale, so there is nobody to talk to. WakeBridge solves this with a device that is always on at home (the bridge): you reach it over Tailscale, and it shouts the magic packet on the local Wi-Fi.

How it works

• Devices, IPs and status come from tailscale status --json. No hard-coded IPs.
• Wake: SSH into the bridge and pipe a short Python script through stdin. It sends the magic packet (6 × FF + the MAC 16 times) to 255.255.255.255 and to the local subnet broadcast. The app then polls port 3389 every 3 s and opens mstsc as soon as the PC answers.
• Online vs. awake: Tailscale takes minutes to mark a sleeping PC offline, so the app trusts port 3389 instead of Tailscale's online flag.
• Config is only what Tailscale can't know: which device is the bridge, and each PC's MAC. It lives in %APPDATA%\com.gustacassel.wakebridge\config.json and is edited from the UI.
• Closing the window hides it to the tray. Quit from the tray menu.

Requirements

Machine running the app

• Windows, Tailscale connected
• An SSH key authorized on the bridge (the app uses BatchMode, there is no way to type a password)

Bridge (an old Android works great)

• Tailscale set as Always-on VPN
• Termux and Termux:Boot, both from the same source (GitHub or F-Droid), with pkg install openssh python
• ~/.termux/boot/start.sh running termux-wake-lock and sshd
• No secure lock screen, so Termux:Boot runs after a reboot without anyone unlocking the phone
• Termux, Termux:Boot and Tailscale excluded from battery optimization

PC to be woken

• Network adapter allowed to wake the computer, magic packet only
• Hibernation off (powercfg /h off): Wi-Fi can wake from sleep (S3), never from hibernate (S4) or shutdown (S5)
• BIOS: ErP disabled, Wake on LAN enabled
• Always sleep it, never shut down

Wi-Fi only? Wake-on-WLAN works from sleep only, because the adapter must stay associated with the access point, and only the OS driver can do that. With a cable, classic WoL also works from shutdown.

SSH key for the bridge

On the machine running the app:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519
type $env:USERPROFILE\.ssh\id_ed25519.pub | ssh -p 8022 <bridge-ip> "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Once ssh -p 8022 <bridge-ip> logs in without a password, turn password login off in Termux: set PasswordAuthentication no in $PREFIX/etc/ssh/sshd_config and restart sshd.

Development

Needs Rust, the Visual Studio Build Tools (C++ workload) and Node.js.

npm install
npm run tauri dev     # run with hot reload
npm run tauri build   # installer in src-tauri\target\release\bundle\nsis
cd src-tauri; cargo test

License

MIT