Mac Loses Network Connection while Sleeping (Wake for Network Access ENABLED)

OK, I found out that my problem is something else. I thought that my Mac was not waking up. It, in fact, was waking up from network access, but after it wakes up, it disconnects from the network for 30 seconds for some reason. A configuration problem that's been happening on other computers too. I'm trying to figure that out.

Wake on network access doesn't require an Apple router, to my knowledge. I think you mean that network activation (forget what it was called) that was meant to work on newer Macs with iPhoto and stuff. I have an AEBS with wireless-N. I used to have an Actiontec router (horrible, by the way), and it worked on that. In fact, if you don't even go through the router and connect to the Mac on the same LAN, it will work. I just tried putting my Mac to sleep and connecting to it via AFP on another computer, and it woke up instantly.

The article isn't very clear, but I've seen from a Google search "wake on LAN on Mac" that people think that the setting in Energy Saver enables simple wake on LAN as well. Maybe it does both. Wake on Demand has the advantages of advertising the sleeping Mac's services via Bonjour and responding to pings without waking up the sleeping Mac.

To be honest, I hardly know how Bonjour works, just that it's used to discover Apple devices on a network and that it gives each Mac an alternate hostname that you can use (for example, Bobs-Mac-Pro).. It seems like the Bonjour Sleep Proxy would only work if you're connecting via Bonjour to the Mac. If you connect directly by the IP address (192.168.1.12 for example), the router must send that straight to that Mac and not through a Bonjour Sleep Proxy (because how would it know to look for a BSP?). I tried connecting by address to my Mac from a computer on LAN while my Mac was asleep, and it woke up. It used to do that over the Internet, but now it doesn't, which is my problem. I was going to take it a step further and cut out any Bonjour Sleep Proxies totally by connecting the computers directly with ethernet, but that caused my Mac to refuse to sleep at all.

Ah, so I see how BSP works now. I had already read that page, but I didn't notice until now:

On the Bonjour page: "Bonjour locates devices such as printers, other computers, and the services that those devices offer on a local network using multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) service records."

On the Bonjour Sleep Proxy page, it says this: "A device acting as a sleep proxy server will respond to Multicast DNS queries for another, compatible device which has gone into low power mode."

So if I'm connecting from the WAN through a non-Apple router straight to my Mac at home by IP address, there is no mDNS query, so no Bonjour-enabled device will ever see that request before it goes to my Mac. It must be that the setting in System Preferences enables wake-on-LAN as well, or else my Mac would not be waking up. However, I now have a separate problem that's making my Mac never receive the packet, so I'll have to deal with that...