I have three machines on my internal home network and WOL works perfectly for me.
I can remotely wake up and shut down the Linux box that has the tRio server and, in fact, do so daily.
I think the "unreliability" issue is likely due to a computer that is too old to properly support WOL. I did have some machines that didn't work so well. But everything I have now works like a charm.
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[3 rebadged Dell DARs, 1 Rio Receiver] [JReceiver 0.2.5 and tRio 0.1.6 on SuSE 9.3 Pro]