"Greener SC"... and SC protocol

[pablolie]

so i am here rethingking what is best for my home server needs, which also hosts of course the SC.

i know many here use venerable old servers that get a second lease on life as a SC engine, which is great. less polution and all.

but since i use my home server for many things, i have a pretty powered up workstation. in use powersaving features, but it does stay on 24/7 and probably sucks about 65w in average, it uses the intel frequency adjustment and turns off some peripherals. i could do better if i had a more reliable sleep mode.

so i could tranfer my components to a new mobo that supports the sleep mode more solidly so i can use the "wake from LAN" without having to run up stairs and act manually a few times a times a week.

but for that the question is - would the communication between the boxes and the SC keep waking up the server all the time, or truly only when music is to be played? i have heard 2 different versions on that.

[SuperQ]

If you sleep the server it will stay in sleep until you wake it. The wake on lan packet is only sent when you hit the "on" button with the remote.

[aubuti]

...and be sure to check out the SrvrPowerCtrl plugin, which allows you to set things so that your SBs (or a subset of your SBs) switches over to SqueezeNetwork automatically when your SC server goes to sleep, and switches back to SC when it wakes up again. A must have if you're at all interested in saving electricity draw, even on a "green" server.

[pablolie]

...keep it coming! :-)

question - if the players stay in pause the sc will not stay asleep? the players must be off?

i just want to make sure before i spent around $500 (new mobo and SSD drive was my idea) on something that does not make all that much of a difference...

thanks again!

[aubuti]

question - if the players stay in pause the sc will not stay asleep? the players must be off?
Fair enough. I *think* that the SrvrPowerCtrl plugin will suspend/hibernate/shutdown the server if all players are idle for the user-configurable time period, so it would sleep even if the players were only paused. But best to check with gharris999, who wrote the plugin. There's a long thread over in the 3rd Party Plugins forum.

[epoch1970]

I think too, that pause is an idle mode for srvPowerControl. It can also sling the players to SN before sleeping the server, so you can hit the remote and listen to radio and not wake-up the server.

The way your machine wakes up is up to you (BIOS settings). The normal choice is wake on WOL packets. Other options, such a wake on broadcasts/any network activity are just too sensitive on a Lan.
I believe Intel-based boards, desktop class, are better if you want to rely heavily on ACPI. The add-on cards may also be responsible for a system hanging at sleep or wake, btw.

You could also look for a totally embedded platform, running 24/7 and drawing less power than a conventional mobo in sleep mode. CPU and Ram will probably be a bit short, but given the directions taken for SC 8 (arm port, "no-gui") I think this could be a good solution, unless you need to drive TBs of storage.