On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 02:07:26PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
James Elsey wrote:
Hi Chris,
You could always have a look at "Wake-on-LAN", if your garage PC is only used for backups you could leave it switched off and wake it up over LAN when you need to do a backup, either manually or via some scheduled scripts.
Yes that seems the sensible way to go, assuming it is just a backup file server then a cold boot should happen in seconds, so a backup script running from the client end that wakes the box up, runs the backups and then shuts it down would seem ideal. You don't need to retain machine state between power cycles so why bother with suspend/resume at all ?
Yes, I suppose suspend/resume is doing stuff that I don't need isn't it.
If you want to run everything from the backup server itself then some BIOS's support scheduled wakeups although good luck finding anything with specific mention of it when choosing a machine.
It doesn't even have to be run from the backup server end of things, if I schedule backups at specific times I can get the backup server to power itself up from (say) 02:00 to 04:00 and schedule the backups in that window.
All it needs is a time clock to power it up at 02:00, the BIOS set up to start up on power arriving and a cron job to shut the system down at 04:00, then the time clock removes power some time after.
In fact that would seem the easiest way to do it if the BIOS allows me to start up on power up.