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Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

dgross.ca

71–80 of 244 posts

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#71

Saying Windows has had it since Windows 98 and then, acknowledging that the issue is wake-on-demand is a bit confusing to say the least. Obviously Linux can sleep easily since decades ago. The issue is wake on demand (and I don't know if Windows has that even) Edit: I don't why everyone's having issues. I run Fedora on a cheap Gigabyte G5KD and never had any problems. Never did with either of my thinkpads or my Xiaom…

> Obviously Linux can sleep easily since decades ago.

No.

I have an old Dell laptop that still doesn't power off when asked from Ubuntu Desktop. Always reboots instead.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll be disappointed by the kernel support, especially if you want to run docker containers or anything like that.

Indeed, running docker on android requires a custom kernel: https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d... The pixel 6 and 7 have full KVM capabilities tho: https://www.patreon.com/posts/74333551

The pixel 6 and 7 options are awesome

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#74
post #33

This looks like one of those home server infrastructure setup rabbit holes I would've bailed out of within the first 10 minutes of Googling to research the problem. I commend the author for their perseverance and the writeup - rabbit hole writeups are their own form of entertainment. That alone was worth it. I could never run anything that looks like such a conceptual pain the butt. A pain to maintain and troubleshoo…

Nice to know I'm not alone. If I could reclaim time spent on rabbit hole projects that concluded with bail out, I feel I'd have a whole other lifetime. Yet somehow, each new rabbit hole project lures me in.

[deleted]

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#75
post #3

Another option, if your needs are relatively modest, is to choose a low power mini PC. The one I chose idles at around 5W under Linux before any tweaking. It is based on the Intel N5105. I have a few 2.5” external HDDs attached for backup which are configured to sleep after a short time.

I feel like there's a lot of room in the market for a chip that sips power but has a billion PCIE lanes and RAM. Does such a system exist?

PCIe switch chips can be used to multiplex many devices on to a few lanes already, today.

There isn’t much market demand for an extremely low power chip with excessive PCIe IO and a ton of RAM because most applications with high RAM and IO requirements are going to be very power intensive.

It’s already possible to build an Intel system with plenty of RAM and IO where the CPU doesn’t take much power.

For building a high capacity NAS you don’t need the throughput of PCIe for all of your drives. Cheap SATA SSDs can easily saturate your network link when used in parallel.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#76
post #16

Diagrams are just visible enough that I can tell that they're present but I cannot otherwise see them. I suppose that's because I'm using a dark theme on Firefox. Not that it matters. There's enough text to figure out what's going on in the first place and it would not help me much in any case. I have a file server running of an ancient server motherboard from another age. (Supermicro X8SIL w/X3460 and 16GB ECC RAM)…

> I tried suspending the server and power dropped to about 75W - not a huge saving.

This doesn’t sound like it’s actually suspending. Or it may have left the drives spinning. Server gear usually isn’t optimized for actually sleeping. Workstation boards are much more likely to work.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#77
post #35
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unlikely. The world has made its peace with NAT, and IPv4 is simpler and therefore easier to understand. IPv6 isn't happening.

Roughly 40% (and rising) of Google users use IPv6. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Is that mostly mobile phones while on cellular data, perhaps?

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#78
post #20
post #3

Another option, if your needs are relatively modest, is to choose a low power mini PC. The one I chose idles at around 5W under Linux before any tweaking. It is based on the Intel N5105. I have a few 2.5” external HDDs attached for backup which are configured to sleep after a short time.

I'm curious if you have measured power at the well (e.g. smart plug with energy metering or Kill-a-watt.) I just set up a test server with a J1900 (10W TDP.) With 8GB RAM and running from an SSD it uses 25W. Add 4 7200RPM HDDs and it's up to 65W idling. I have another test server based on a Raspberry Pi 4B. The Pi boots from SD card and uses about 5W. Add 2 drives in a USB drive bay and power for the setup is now up…

> I just set up a test server with a J1900 (10W TDP.) With 8GB RAM and running from an SSD it uses 25W.

Did you use a regular desktop power supply? PC power supplies can consume 10-15W or more at idle. To build a low power system you need to find a good low power, high efficiency power supply.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#79
post #33

This looks like one of those home server infrastructure setup rabbit holes I would've bailed out of within the first 10 minutes of Googling to research the problem. I commend the author for their perseverance and the writeup - rabbit hole writeups are their own form of entertainment. That alone was worth it. I could never run anything that looks like such a conceptual pain the butt. A pain to maintain and troubleshoo…

If an idling raspberry pi is too power hungry, a microcontroller like an ESP32 could be made to respond to ARPs. $8 for the MCU and a couple of afternoons of noodling. It's not going to run avahi for you though.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

#80
Very nice, I didn't know that you could wake computers with unicast packets.

For my use case, I run a Raspberry Pi that is on the same local network as my PC. When I connect to the Pi to forward my PC's RDP port to my laptop's loopback interface, the Pi sends a normal magic packet to wake my PC. All that was needed was an entry like this in my laptop's .ssh/config:

  Host remote-desktop
          HostName raspberry-pi
          User pi
          Port 1234
          IdentityFile ~/.ssh/raspberry-pi-key
          LocalForward  3389 my-pc.local:3389
          SessionType default
          RemoteCommand wakeonlan -i 192.168.178.255 11:22:33:44:55:66; cat
Each time the RDP port is forwarded, the wakeonlan command is run on the Raspberry Pi. The 'cat' at the end keeps the command from exiting so that the RDP port keeps being forwarded. (I also configured the NOPASSWD option for wakeonlan in /etc/sudoers so that no root privileges are needed to run it.)
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