Hello,

I am challenged with nearly 100 proprietary servers that I need to remotely 
power control in a netboot environment.  The goal is to have  these servers in 
a powered-off (or minimally powered) state when not actively in use, and 
automate power-on to network boot into a workload OS on demand.  These servers 
are directly powered in a way that I cannot mechanically control.  They are 
equipped with Intel 82757 LOM NICs, but unfortunately do not have BIOS support 
for Wake-on-LAN (and because they are LOM, I cannot update them with the Intel 
Boot Agent).  They do appear to support ACPI, so I hope there is a way to 
leverage this to simulate a WoL capability.

My thoughts are to place the server into an idle state by network-booting a 
very lightweight OS (DSL, NDSL, PuppyLinux, etc) then suspending it into ACPI 
S3 or S4 to minimize power draw.  On demand, we would need to "wake up" the 
server just enough to force it to reboot -- at which point it would be 
automated to network boot into a different OS to support the workload required, 
so full recovery from these states may not be necessary.

Is anyone here aware of any existing work along these lines, have any 
suggestions, or can offer other alternatives?

thank you!
Henry

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