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

(dgross.ca)
294 points AgaoAnar | 5 comments | 02 Sep 25 19:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.907s | source
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drnick1 ◴[02 Sep 25 21:33 UTC] No.45109352[source]▶
All this complexity to save a few bucks per year on your electricity bill? This is ridiculous, the Pi costs far more than what you can be expected to save.
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esseph ◴[02 Sep 25 22:18 UTC] No.45109848[source]▶
Are you a programmer by chance? Some are, and they enjoy it!

I know a lot of sysadmins / platform engineer types. A lot of them really enjoy the mix of hardware and software integration challenges.

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bongodongobob ◴[02 Sep 25 23:01 UTC] No.45110238[source]▶
I don't know any sysadmins who would do this. Task scheduler for Windows or rtcwake for Linux. We try to reduce complexity with existing battle tested tools, not create whatever this is. This is definitely not the easy way.
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1. esseph ◴[03 Sep 25 01:56 UTC] No.45111479[source]▶
Ah, you're not a tinkerer!
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2. bongodongobob ◴[03 Sep 25 02:21 UTC] No.45111629[source]▶
I definitely am. But this is a very solved problem. It just adds brittleness to the system. Maintenance for this is going to suck. It's going to break in less than a year because you forgot to set a static IP address, or a Python library changes, or the SD card in the PI gets corrupted, or the jack on it fries, or its cheap PSU died and fries the board, etc. Then you're going to have to try to remember how the damn thing works, then figure out what other tiny change somewhere broke something. You should never add more failure points to infra, ever.

I guess everyone has to go through it.

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3. esseph ◴[03 Sep 25 02:44 UTC] No.45111760[source]▶
> I guess everyone has to go through it

Bingo, but some people never stop tinkering - their joy is in avoiding the well trod path.

4. edg5000 ◴[03 Sep 25 05:26 UTC] No.45112490[source]▶
I do agree that it would be nice if no external device would be needed. It does make me wonder if the Pi is truly needed. I'll be looking into this myself as well, I also have power hungry servers that are mostly idling and would benefit from WoL. In some EU countries, energy prices are truly a scam.
5. littlestymaar ◴[03 Sep 25 06:27 UTC] No.45112807[source]▶
> Then you're going to have to try to remember how the damn thing works

Fortunately, the author wrote a derailed essay explaining all of this…

> You should never add more failure points to infra, ever.

Every time you add a new system or a new feature you necessarily “add more failure points”, there's no way around that.

One should avoid introducing more failure points than needed for the functionality you want, that's it.

You say it's a “solved problem”, but you only give solutions to a different problem (starting the server at a scheduled time, when the author wants to start the server on demand).