How can I save money and power on my home servers?
Written by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com on May 8, 2008 – 12:17 pm -
If you are any type of respectable geek you have one or more machines at home that you use to store your porn important data, documents and backups.
You probably also leave these machines on all the time. If you’re not using them to pull down torrents all night or need to remote into them, you really should shut them down when they aren’t being used for long periods of time. Shutting them down would save a lot of electricity, which will save you money.
By now you’re thinking, “Yeah, that sounds good, but it’s a PITA to turn them on and off all the time. And some of them are headless so how am I going to do that?”
You use Auto Poweron & Shutdown. The application runs as a Windows service and lets you schedule multiple on and off schedules per day, week or any custom schedule you want.
Technically, it doesn’t power down the machine completely, it puts it into hibernate. Obviously, if it was completely powered off, it wouldn’t be able to turn itself back on. But you can use the app to fully power down the machine if you really want to.
I have been using it to shut my file and print server down every night and then power it back on before I get up in the morning. I also power it down during the day when I’m at work and then back on before I get home. I have customized the schedule so it only shuts down during the day on weekdays.
Instead of running the machine 168 hours a week, I’m now running it less than 87 hours a week. That’s a 50% reduction in power with no real effort or inconvenience on my part.
The application costs $24.95 and there is a 30-day trial. I know we all love free stuff, but depending on how much you pay for electricity you’ll probably save more than you pay for it within a year.
There are tons of ways to shut a machine down at a specific time, but this is one of the very few I found that can turn a machine back on at a scheduled time. Do you know of any others?
Tags: General
Posted in General |
By NinjaAdmin on May 8, 2008 | Reply
If your machines support it Wake on Lan is the way to go. The Admin and i set up a office in a to remain nameless third world country that was power conscience this way (think hand cranks and batteries.) This allowed the servers to be on when needed and in a deep sleep when not needed. Its not fully off but it does pretty good.
How does this application work?
By AskTheAdmin on May 8, 2008 | Reply
It uses S3 Sleep Mode like WOL ( http://www.ezlan.net/WOL.html “>http://www.ezlan.net/WOL.html ) does but from what i can gather it makes it work even if your NIC or MainBoard doesn't support it. I don't know how or if it really does but there is no hard ware requirements. 30 day trial - Guess I will give it a go on some of my older headless windows 2000 servers.
By AskTheAdmin on May 8, 2008 | Reply
It uses S3 Sleep Mode like WOL ( http://www.ezlan.net/WOL.html “>http://www.ezlan.net/WOL.html ) does but from what i can gather it makes it work even if your NIC or MainBoard doesn't support it. I don't know how or if it really does but there is no hard ware requirements. 30 day trial - Guess I will give it a go on some of my older headless windows 2000 servers.
By AskTheAdmin on May 8, 2008 | Reply
Apparently the hardware does not need to be compliant and here is a free app to wake up machines that go into sleep mode via power settings:
http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/wake-on-lan-gu...“>
http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/wake-on-lan-gu...
/>
Its free - none of the bells and whistles like the above app but it is a great proof of concept that you can script these "magic packets" yourself! I haven't played with WOL since Windows NT with NinjaAdmin. What was that like 1998?
Anyone else using this for something?
By AskTheAdmin on May 8, 2008 | Reply
Apparently the hardware does not need to be compliant and here is a free app to wake up machines that go into sleep mode via power settings:
http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/wake-on-lan-gu...“>
http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/wake-on-lan-gu...
/>
Its free - none of the bells and whistles like the above app but it is a great proof of concept that you can script these "magic packets" yourself! I haven't played with WOL since Windows NT with NinjaAdmin. What was that like 1998?
Anyone else using this for something?
By Peter on May 8, 2008 | Reply
I don't really understand how it works either, but it does. I assume it's some type of WOL thing, but it's waking itself up. That's the great part, you don't have to leave any other machine on to send the magic packet.
By spanznet on May 8, 2008 | Reply
amazing timing, I just finished researching a way to shutdown my pc after my 'off-peak' download time finishes at 12 noon (stupid Australian broadband). I pretty much concluded there was no freeware way to do it until I discovered the DOS command 'at'. So now I have on my desktop a batch file that contains:
at 12:01pm shutdown.exe -s
which I double-click on my way out the door in the mornings of the days that I want my pc to shutdown. Easy and free.
By AskTheAdmin on May 8, 2008 | Reply
But to turn it back on you need to manually power her back up
By Keith on May 8, 2008 | Reply
I read somewhere that powering up and powering down your computer lots of time isn't good for the hardware?
By Jaime on May 8, 2008 | Reply
Computers from this century were made to be shutdown instead of always on. But this s3 sleep is not really totally powered off.
By Boris on May 8, 2008 | Reply
Don't know about you, but every computer I have ever worked on, had, or have, has a feature in the BIOS to turn it on by itself at a specific time. And to turn it off you then can use some free app.
By AskTheAdmin on May 8, 2008 | Reply
none of my dells have this
By apple][e on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
All of my dells have the option to turn on at a specific time.