Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)

#111

Post by t_mahmood » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #102

t_mahmood wrote: post #82

Ha ha, I tried something similar when I had to go to Thailand for my wife's treatment. And failed spectacularly. Fortunately, my laptop had all the files. I didn't have Tailscale at that time. My Desktop, WoL on, tested to be working Android Phone, always on All have SyncThing installed. Mobile had Tasker installed. So, the idea was to have Tasker monitor a folder inside SyncThing, When I need my computer, I put a fi…

You worked with what you had and understood, it was beautiful. I for one just leave the beast on, I understand that spin-ups and downs are the main thing that wreck harddrives (and my beast has a lot.)

Thank you!

For me, power outages were/are a big issue, lost one of the HDD recently then, did not want to risk the new one.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)

#112

Post by xk3 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:30 PM UTC

If you just want it to sleep during the night you could do something like this:

    sudo rtcwake -m mem --date=+15hours

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)

#113

Post by b0dhimind » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 3:48 AM UTC

I don't have a homebrew server for all the coolest open-source apps or a device to wake it up but it would be awesome if someone had a guide for dummies, including what to buy while keeping things relatively future-proof.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)

#114

Post by zbrozek » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC

bjackman wrote: post #89

zbrozek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My home server is a pig and draws about 100 watts idle.

You should try running powertop on it. It will scrape sysfs and look for things that seem misconfigured, and suggest changes to fix them. On one of my machines it enabled some peripheral power saving mode that made a pretty dramatic saving! (I also heard that it sometimes suggests power saving modes that are usually switched off for a good reason, like apparently you really don't want some USB controllers going into…

It's a server motherboard, not a consumer motherboard, so it doesn't surprise me that power management is not great. AMD Rome is also not exactly known for its low idle power.

Looking at powertop, the various qemu virtual machines have high events/sec compared to host processes. There are also a couple of timers - tick_nohz_handler and hrtimer_wakeup - which seem to generate hundreds of events per second.

Re: Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)

#115

Post by codethief » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 11:04 AM UTC

privatelypublic wrote: post #106

bjackman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this recently as I was struggling to get WoL to work with my consumer PC. It seems like this ultra low-level stuff is a total crapshoot so if you can dodge it by just wiring up the power button, that's a good option. In in the end I just went the whole hog and set up a PiKVM, so now if I mess up the machine's networking (or even completely break the OS) I can still recover it remotely even though it doesn't hav…

I'm absolutely excited for the nanoKVM-PCIe. They were out of stock last I looked, but they've released the firmware source as promised.

NanoKVM looks really neat, thank you!

I take it you're in the US? Because it seems I (in Europe) could order it from Aliexpress, see the link on https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM.

EDIT: It seems the NanoKVM is struggling with one of the most fundamental KVM tasks, though: https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM/issues/594

I really liked the PCIe form factor, but it looks like I'll have to go for https://tinypilotkvm.com/ instead.