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

dgross.ca

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

#171

Post by iudqnolq »

gertlex wrote: post #162
DCKing wrote: 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…

> 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. Absolutely have felt the same often, in the past. Good news! There's ChatGPT now! It's so much quicker than google for figuring out approaches; it's great for explaining concepts and "how to do x with tech". And it's great at writing the scripts for you…

This seems like an example of the worst setup for ChatGPT.

There isn't much info on the internet about it. Of the info that exists most is inconsistent, outdated, and/or wrong. The specific instructions need to depend on what's supported by the exact model number of your network card. You're dealing with hardware, so there's a chance of breaking things permanently. Close has zero value, the solution needs to be exactly right. Close but incorrect solutions are hard to debug.

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

#172

Post by laweijfmvo »

SoftTalker wrote: post #105

I just let my computer run all the time. Disable all sleep functionality except monitor sleep. Then it always works when I need it to. My life is way too short to fool around with stuff like this to save $5 in electricity and have to deal with the inevitiable "won't wake up" or "wakes up in a brain-damaged state" situations.

I'm tempted to do this as well, given the likelihood of everything working if/when my linux desktop (or laptop) actually wakes up is about 50/50 these days.

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

#173

Post by thesnide »

While I applaud the effort, I'm really wondering about leveraging something like a ODROID HC4 and don't worry too much about the standby power consumption.

I mean, I even recently purchased an old refurbished i5 enterprise mini PC that consumes about 5W in idle mode, not even standby.

It makes sense as it is leveraging laptop components inside.

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

#174

Post by dekhn »

jeffbee wrote: post #149
aequitas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but you could argue that the Raspberry Pi is not performant enough during restores or browsing the backups. During the backup itself performance should not have to be that big of an issue as it's mostly a background operation you will not be waiting on. You could also use the RPi as a stepping stone which syncs it's files to the 'real' backup server which is on a daily/weekly timer instead of on-demand setup…

> power hungry server running 24/7 Nothing in this article supports this statement. It just says "high power consumption" without measuring, and declares victory without measuring the power saved. The fact is that power scaling has almost erased the difference between "suspended" and just "idle", to such an extent that there might not even be a meaningful difference, or any measurable difference. My NUC 12 Pro is dra…

NOte that the NUCs with power saving and wifi have a serious problem: latency. By default in the various Linux OSen I use, wifi power management is enabled. Often times, repeated pings will jump from 5ms to 100+ms (with a very high variance) and network bandwidth will be extremely poor. Even ssh on a LAN can be unusable!

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

#175

Post by nottorp »

manmal wrote: post #170
DJBunnies wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that much power" is pretty subjective, is it 2x or 10x a pi? Might be a turnoff for some.

The N100 has a TDP of 6W. I haven't measured power draw of the whole system yet though, I imagine that the mainboard will pull another couple watts at least. It shines especially in scenarios where the Pi is just a tad too slow. E.g. you can't live transcode 4k videos on a Pi, while the N100 has latest UHD graphics and therefore ships with a decent HW-accelerated H265 en/decoder.

There are a lot of low power media boxes but few servers sadly.

By server i mean multiple network ports and storage ports, space in the case for several spinny discs in addition to the ssds etc.

I doubt any NUC is good for a server by my definition.

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

#176

Post by nottorp »

jdminhbg wrote: post #116
testfoobar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time Machine over NAS has always been unstable for me. As you experienced, my backup would be regularly corrupted and would need to restart. Alternatively, a normal I eventually gave up on the NAS and now backup to external drives at home. This site has excellent articles on Time Machine - scroll down to Time Machine Problems: https://eclecticlight.co/mac-troubleshooting-summary/

I had the exact same problem and ended up with the same solution. I know people who have had somewhat better experiences backing up to something like a Synology, but the $Xk investment wasn't worth it for me without also needing it for big file storage or media serving or whatever.

> backing up to something like a Synology

How about QNAP? I happen to have one gathering dust, if you can reliably Time Machine to it i'd plug it in.

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

#177

Post by qwertox »

DCKing wrote: 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…

I had a somewhat similar setup and it worked pretty good as long as I needed it. A Raspi, which would also do other stuff, like provide the DNS service, would wake up a backup server, which was a Xeon machine and consumed a lot of power, also was running Windows. The Raspi would wake it up 4 times a day, the server had a Task set up to run some Python scripts which invoked robocopy so that the server pulled the data off of another machine which was always on and required to be backed up. When ready it shut itself down and all was good.

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

#178

Post by nottorp »

m463 wrote: post #163
nottorp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I was thinking too. My home server consumes like 15 W and is silent (and saturates gigabit). If you get a rack mounted server made for data centers and stick it in a closet so you can't hear it then yes, i guess this approach makes sense.

> and stick it in a closet went down that route years and years ago and... it heats up the closet. Actually, (though not a server) I remember one place I lived, I just put my monitor, keyboard and mouse in the bedroom at a nice desk. Then I ran the cables through the wall to the computer in the next room where it could be loud and cool. (quiet, fast, cool: pick two)

Haha when I was young and didn't know better i splurged on a dual socket AMD desktop. Athlon 1600M it was, I think.

Ended up physically removing a CPU because the noise and heat was... not... worth... it.

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

#179

Post by nottorp »

mardifoufs wrote: post #169
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is defining what it means to be idle. Suppose you have some browser tabs open, so there is some javascript running to switch out the ads on the page every few seconds. Is that "idle"? There's CPU and network activity. Suppose there is an open ssh connection to a server. It sends keepalives because the client is remote and behind a NAT, but there is no "real" activity. Should the server go to sleep? I…

I think Chrome added something like this recently. It "hibernates" the tabs, but you can opt out. The only downside is that I think it loses the tabs' state.

There's at least one extension that doesn't lose tab state, at least on Firefox. The one i use is called "Auto Tab Discard".

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

#180

Post by rektide »

DCKing wrote: 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…

Personally I like having courage to try. I don't tend to see things as requiring maintenance. This looks like an afternoon of messing around and should just work. I don't expect troubleshooting to be hard.

I really love people who can show courage & interest. I feel like computing has decayed into vapid consumerism. Products no longer even try to be semi-technical. There's a whole culture built around telling & selling ourselves the idea that computers are hard & difficult.

All it takes is one person with a good blog post to demystify & make accessible. You are smart enough. You can be that person. You can Augment Human Intellect by talking through it.

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