Green Server II

I published some time ago a news regarding reducing the power consumption of my home server to 53 W. There was some open issues like how to reduce the consumption further.

Regarding this, I finally simply decided to switch off the server automatically every night using a Cron job. This is an elegant solution, as I am not hosting anything on this home server, other than stuffs I am using at home. Everything else is on my dedicated server.

This solution has the following two advantages:

• It is very effective: I just need to switch on the server when I need it. It will get switched off automatically after a while. Hence the server is off most of the time.
• It is handy: I don’t need to remember to log on into it just before leaving home. Just switching on the server when I need it, is fully OK for me.

What I can still improve:

• Getting wake-on-lan working. That way I would not even need to switch it on. This would be really cool. I could even configure my WIFI access point to send automatically a wake-on-lan packet to the server, whenever it is accessed for the first time after a long inactivity period. I would just have a longer latency the first time I am accessing the server, whenever it gets waken up.

Will check this out.

Update: I actually activated wake-on-lan. This is really handy. I did a small script on my mac, which uses the utility ‘wakeonlan’ (installed through fink). That way I can confortably switch on the server remotely from my laptop when I need to. (The wake-on-lan option must be activated in the BIOS.)

The small script that I use (this will only work if the server is in the LAN):

#!/sw/bin/bash
/sw/bin/wakeonlan [server mac address]