Indeed. Throttling down the server power usage is exactly the purpose of my
exercise here. I want to show mostly the availability of this solution rather
than any determination of the utility of same. According to
http://ebscosustainability.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/data-center-energy-efficiency.pdf
even an efficient server still uses about half its full power when doing
virtually no work so it would be great if we had an easy to use, CPU-load
checking, aggressive power management system.
I have tested using cpufreq-set to slow my boxes down to a crawl with very
little effect on power usage so I think using suspend or hibernate are
a couple
of the few options I have left. I'll try some of your suggestions;
hooking up a
digiboard and multiplexing out serial access, or using jabr's idea, but I
wonder if suspend will turn off access to everything but usb and / or ps2,
which is where it is expecting to get a mouse wiggle from...
Thanks for the help... I'll keep you posted... I also bought some
IP-addressable
plugstrips and will test upsd and nut with it. Shutdowns may be a little too
aggressive though; I don't think I have that much time between jobs!
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 09:57:53AM -0400, Kurt Keville wrote:
Thanks... I'll give that a test... my big problem is (or will be)
lack of physical access to the servers and I figure this has to have
been bumped into out there in Datacenterland by someone... Federico
pointed me at powernap which appears to have some hook options that
might fit the criteria...
Another potential solution to this, depending on the details of your
arrangement, is to set up console access on the serial port, and then
use a terminal server or similar device to access the console over the
serial port. Especially if you're going to have a rack full of
servers set up this way, it can come in quite handy.
http://www.howtoforge.com/setting_up_a_serial_console
IIRC server-class hardware (maybe all hardware these days?) can also
be configured to provide bios access on a serial port, e.g.:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00440332/c00440332.pdf
I agree with Jerry that your server machines should have ACPI power
settings disabled so they just never sleep. Much modern hardware does
have a wake-on-lan feature, though IIRC you need to send it a
particular type of network message for that to work (and it needs to
be enabled). But there's really no reason for a machine intended to
act as a server to ever go to sleep, unless you are the only one who
will ever access it, and you're prepared to wake it up every time you
want to do so.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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