With the minimal configuration in place, Desomnia reacts to any connection directed at the watched host’s IP address. Depending on your operating system and running applications, background traffic — such as network discovery, address resolution, or periodic health checks — can occasionally match and trigger an unwanted wake-up.

The following sections explain how to narrow this down to the connections you actually care about.

Filter by service

The most reliable way to prevent unwanted wake-ups is to restrict Desomnia to specific services by port number. Adding a <ServiceFilterRule> with type="Must" makes it an inclusive filter: only connections to that specific port will trigger a wake-up.

<RemoteHost name="server" MAC="00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E" IPv4="192.168.1.10">
  <ServiceFilterRule name="SSH" port="22" type="Must" />
</RemoteHost>

This configuration wakes "server" only when a TCP connection to port 22 is detected. All other connections to that host are ignored.

To react to multiple services, add one rule per port:

<RemoteHost name="server" MAC="00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E" IPv4="192.168.1.10">
  <ServiceFilterRule name="SSH"  port="22"   type="Must" />
  <ServiceFilterRule name="SMB"  port="445"  type="Must" />
  <ServiceFilterRule name="RDP"  port="3389" type="Must" />
  <ServiceFilterRule name="HTTP" port="80"   type="Must" />
</RemoteHost>

As long as at least one inclusive rule is present, any connection to a port not listed is automatically ignored.

For UDP-based services, set protocol="UDP" explicitly:

<ServiceFilterRule name="DNS" protocol="UDP" port="53" type="Must" />

Hint

The name attribute on a <ServiceFilterRule> is optional and purely descriptive. It appears in log output and helps identify which rule triggered an event.

Excluding specific services

If only a small number of services cause unwanted noise, you may prefer the opposite approach: leave the default behaviour in place — wake on any connection — and explicitly exclude the services you want to ignore using type="MustNot":

<RemoteHost name="server" MAC="00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E" IPv4="192.168.1.10">
  <ServiceFilterRule name="Monitoring" port="8080" type="MustNot" />
</RemoteHost>

Connections to port 8080 are ignored; all other connections to this host can still trigger a wake-up.

Note

type="MustNot" is the default for all filter rules when no type is set explicitly. The two approaches — whitelisting with type="Must" and blacklisting with type="MustNot" — can be mixed, but the interaction can be difficult to reason about: as soon as at least one type="Must" rule is present, the filter switches to whitelist mode and type="MustNot" rules act only as exclusions within that whitelist.

Shorter notation with <Service>

When all your rules use type="Must", the <Service> shorthand is equivalent and less verbose:

<RemoteHost name="server" MAC="00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E" IPv4="192.168.1.10">
  <Service name="SSH"  port="22" />
  <Service name="SMB"  port="445" />
  <Service name="RDP"  port="3389" />
  <Service name="HTTP" port="80" />
</RemoteHost>

Each <Service> element is equivalent to a <ServiceFilterRule> with type="Must".

Beyond the shorter notation, a <Service> is a full service definition rather than a bare filter rule: Desomnia can advertise it via multicast DNS (Bonjour) while the host is asleep. Clients that rely on service discovery — such as macOS, printers, or media players — then keep finding the service, and the connection attempt that follows wakes the host. This is the same mechanism as Apple’s Sleep Proxy protocol, which Desomnia fully implements.

The following configuration options control this behaviour:

advertiseServices

Enables mDNS advertising of the declared services of a sleeping host. Advertising is off by default; set advertiseServices="true" on the <NetworkMonitor> to enable it for all hosts, or on an individual host to enable (or suppress) it selectively.

serviceName

The DNS-SD service type a <Service> is advertised as — for example serviceName="smb" yields _smb._tcp. If omitted, the lowercase name is used. Ideally this matches the IANA-registered service name.

handoff

If the watched host itself runs Desomnia, it can instead register its services with the proxy just before it suspends (handoff="SleepProxy" on the host), making the static declarations on the proxy unnecessary. Individual services are excluded from that registration with handoff="false" on the <Service> element.