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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

#181

Post by hulitu »

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…

> A Raspberry Pi that itself would work just as fine as the Time Machine server the author seems to need on demand?

A Raspberry Pi has one big problem: no SATA ports.

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

#182

Post by saltcured »

Tangentially, I remember MythTV had support for the self-scheduled variant of this. I used to have a PC with multiple HDDs hooked to the TV and antenna which would look at its own TV recording schedule and power off when it was idle and wouldn't be recording in the next hour or less. Before powering off, it would set an RTC alarm to wake 10 minutes before the next scheduled recording. Meanwhile, if I walked into the room and wanted to watch recordings while it was off, I would just press the power button let it boot up to use the onscreen UI with IR remote control. I never bothered to figure out if I could make the IR receiver behave in some standby mode to wake the PC.

The next time we moved, I couldn't be bothered to set all this up again. Now we just use an old laptop and browser for streaming and a bluetooth keyboard with pointing device for "remote" control. It idles at low enough power to run 24/7 and not care, but we can also just open/close the lid as if it is a sleep switch for the media function.

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

#184

Post by gertlex »

monocasa wrote: post #164
gertlex wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So far my experience has been the opposite with ChapGPT FWIW. Overall it has cost me more time sending me down rabbit holes that it totally made up, but said with absolute confidence.

This is interesting to hear!

A key caveat in much of what I'm doing, is I'm implementing things I previously did for other projects in the past 15 years... so I'm using old technology, know the terminology, and can troubleshoot 90% correct stuff that chatGPT gives me.

I haven't done as much "I have no idea where to start" stuff.

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

#185

Post by gertlex »

iudqnolq wrote: post #171
gertlex wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exact…

I didn't in-depth read the main article here. But skimmed most of it.

Not sure any of it is going to brick hardware, but I haven't played with setting flags with ethtool. I've messed with Wake-on-Lan stuff in the past, as well as "prevent device from randomly waking from sleep" issues, too (on Windows, though).

I do have the advantage of a lot of past experience with Atmegas then RPis, so know a lot of the common sense hardware considerations... and a lot of troubleshooting. For me getting 90% correct with ChatGPT, and building up incrementally, has been an improvement on doing it all myself with google.

I might take an attempt at asking chatGPT how to do what the author did. Could be informative, even if just introspective realizations like, "oh, this is a question I asked in a good way due to my existing knowledge."

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

#186

Post by McAtNite »

gertlex wrote: post #184
monocasa wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far my experience has been the opposite with ChapGPT FWIW. Overall it has cost me more time sending me down rabbit holes that it totally made up, but said with absolute confidence.

This is interesting to hear! A key caveat in much of what I'm doing, is I'm implementing things I previously did for other projects in the past 15 years... so I'm using old technology, know the terminology, and can troubleshoot 90% correct stuff that chatGPT gives me. I haven't done as much "I have no idea where to start" stuff.

I have, and while it’s not perfect I’ve found that it makes a great tutor. I’ve asked it a lot of programming questions where my starting point was 0, and my biggest takeaway is it will give you exactly what you ask for and nothing else.

This can be a bit of a problem since you can’t ask for what you don’t know, so starting broad by having it explain the general concepts to you, and then slowly getting more specific with direct pointed questions had the best outcomes.

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

#187

Post by jeffbee »

dekhn wrote: post #174
jeffbee wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Sure, but it's a miracle that it can do this at all. It's entering and exiting a sleep state that is very nearly off, in between pings.

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

#188

Post by suyjuris »

amiga386 wrote: post #157
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does anyone know a good supplier for such supplies? For 10 years my home server used a Corsair VS350; it was fantastic, and very efficient at low power draw. Recently the fan failed. The PSU seems discontinued. The _fan_ seems discontinued. I'm going to try replacing the fan but I don't know much about electronics. As a temporary measure, I got a regular "gaming PC" PSU and it has 10% more power draw, it's not effici…

> I'm going to try replacing the fan but I don't know much about electronics.

Just in case: opening PSUs is dangerous without precautions. The capacitors may retain enough charge to kill.

Besides the immediate risk to yourself, a PSU can also pose a fire hazard during operation, e.g. if improperly cooled.

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

#189

Post by thefz »

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…

OTOH, there's a ton to learn going down rabbit holes, and these are the reason why I stick to Linux.

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

#190

Post by cyberax »

testfoobar wrote: post #87
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, I struggled to get my pi to work as a time machine server. It would work for a few weeks and then just stop working and I would have to start the backup from scratch previous backups becoming unusable. In the end I just plugged an external hard disk into the mac. I have had similar issues in the past even with such simple things as SSH to a Mac. It would be easy to blame the pi or Linux, but as far as I can tell…

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/

Time Machine has improved a lot after the switch to APFS. Mostly because it supports full snapshots, with an easy way to get the difference between two snapshots.

The previous HFS+ version relied on directory hardlinks that were notoriously buggy and easy to corrupt. The difference computation also required basically recursively walking the entire tree and comparing the directory change times, with each lookup requiring a network round-trip.

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