CentOS - Mar 2009 - Being Green, Time to make the servers sleep!

Shadies and Mentlemen;

I am trying to be green and put our backup servers to sleep during the
day and have them wake on LAN and fire back up at night for our
nightly backups as "sleep" is a sort of low power usage mode.

(At this point I would be curious to know the different levels of
sleep, what can I achieve? Does my server just drop into a low power
state, or can I stop the hard drives as well?)

I am wondering if it is achievable to script the process of putting a
server to sleep so I can cron tab its behind!

I would assume it would be possible but I don't know how, does anyone
have any idea?


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On Mar 19, 2009, at 7:13 AM, James Bensley wrote:
> I would assume it would be possible but I don't know how, does anyone
> have any idea?

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/acpi/

-steve

--  
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an  
improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v




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James Bensley wrote:
> Shadies and Mentlemen;
>
> I am trying to be green and put our backup servers to sleep during the
> day and have them wake on LAN and fire back up at night for our
> nightly backups as "sleep" is a sort of low power usage mode.
>
> (At this point I would be curious to know the different levels of
> sleep, what can I achieve? Does my server just drop into a low power
> state, or can I stop the hard drives as well?)
>
> I am wondering if it is achievable to script the process of putting a
> server to sleep so I can cron tab its behind!
>
> I would assume it would be possible but I don't know how, does anyone
> have any idea?
>   
You are probably best of putting your backup server on an already
running server as a virtual machine. If you really have only one server
running on your lan then you could also consider the following approach.
I use the power-on-time BIOS feature most MB have. My server start
itself every night at 01:55. It is then up and running just before
02:00. At 02:00 I schedule a cron job to do the backup. At the end of
the backup, the script just powers off the machine. The only thing to
experiment with is the time it takes to start the machine. Sometimes the
startup takes longer if disks need to be checked (ext3, every so may
boots) and the cron might not trigger. Using anacron is perhaps the
safest option in this case, but I did not experiment with that.
I could not use wake up on LAN, since the mirror is on a remote location
were it is really the only server.

Theo

From: James Bensley Sent: March 19, 2009 04:13
> 
> I am trying to be green and put our backup servers to sleep during the
> day and have them wake on LAN and fire back up at night for our
> nightly backups as "sleep" is a sort of low power usage mode.
I can not comment on how to do what your asking but I can see one
potential problem. If your solution involves booting the backup server
and during the boot an error is detected in the filesystem check the
boot process will halt waiting for you to manually correct the problem.
Of course you can avoid the problem by making your backup scripts on
the primary server can implement a time limit on the wait for the
backup server and if the wait times out then skip the backup.

Someone out there more knowledgeable then I (and there are many<g>) may
be able to suggest a way to alter the boot to avoid the filesystem
check (or the halt).

HTH

Regards, Hugh

-- 
Hugh E Cruickshank, Forward Software, www.forward-software.com

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:13 PM, James Bensley <jwbensley at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Shadies and Mentlemen;
>
> I am trying to be green and put our backup servers to sleep during the
> day and have them wake on LAN and fire back up at night for our
> nightly backups as "sleep" is a sort of low power usage mode.
Make sure you are not using Seagate 7200.11 series hard disks for this
unless you've somehow obtained and updated the firmwire. Frequent
power cycles increases the chances that you will hit their firmware
bug that apparently bricks the drive if the drive internal log is at
some specific entry number before the power cycle. Was part of the
recent Seagate fiasco.