Thank you for this interesting perspective. Combined with the previous advice, I am convinced. I will not try to have the machine sleep, or even try to put the drives in spun down. From what you guys are saying, it seems doing so would be over-engineering.
What are your thoughts regarding reboots? Should I do a daily, weekly, monthly reboot? > On 27 Nov 2022, at 20:00, Bodie <bo...@bodie.cz> wrote: > > > > On 27.11.2022 10:37, James Johnson wrote: >> Hi all, >> OpenBSD is amazing. But I need help in configuring it correctly as a >> remote server, rarely used. >> The main thing I am trying to do is to make it sleep every now and >> then to protect resources. I am very flexible on how to do this, but >> have been unable to do so. >> Here's what I tried : >> 1) Make it sleep and wake up when woken up remotely >> I investigated Wake On Lan, which I enabled via ifconfig. However, >> this system is deployed remotely, and I have no access to other >> computers on the LAN, so I am unable to make this work. >> 2) Make it sleep for a few hours and then wake up >> After 3hours+ of research in man pages and the internet, I have not >> seen any solution for that. >> 3) hard drives Spin down, CPU lower freq >> I have been able to lower the CPU speed by running `apm -L`. >> I haven't been able to spin down the hard drives. >> How important is it to manually send a command to spin down the unused >> harddrives? Will it be down by the system automatically? >> I am trying to get info on the drives from the system but `atactl sd0 >> checkpower ` always shows `standby` even after I have just written on >> the disk. I understand this does not work because my drives are SCSI >> and not ATA. >> I read the man page for scsi, and I see the command to spin down hard >> drives : `scsi -f /dev/rsd2c -c "1b 0 0 0 0 0"` >> However, I see no command to spin them back up. Is it automatic? >> How can I request information on the spin state of the drive. I am >> just a little worried about starting to send low levels instructions >> to the hard drive, with little understanding of it. Is it safe to send >> this command? >> Thanks all ! >> PS : dmesg : I cannot share the full dmesg for security reasons, but >> it is a fairly standard i386 machine, with 2 drives mounted as SCSI. > > As already pointed out by others. Don't do that ;-) Unless you explain > why you need to do that (I'm sure it is possible without disclosing much) > > I build systems running for eg. 12 years, amd64 architecture, SATA disks, > DDR RAM and so on. Serving number of virtual machines with constantly > higher number of utilizations and in dozens of them only 2 problems > during those years - battery for internal RAID run out :-) > > Saw systems which were running for over 30 years and nothing wrong with > them. > > Can't talk about electricity as those are basically underground cities > and there are different problems then if CPU is running 3 or 1GHz ;-) > > Sounds like maybe some IoT solution, but then go for ARM or use virtual > machine in eg. OpenBSD Amsterdam or you really need compute power on > demand then go for free options in eg. Azure (12 months free basic Linux) > or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or whatever else you find fit. > > Either it is so important, need to be physically under your control and > then small differences in electricity does not matter or solutions above > are perfectly fine for your needs. > > Just one hint. No matter if own machine or something rented you want that > machine to be worth the money that means to do something on it and not > have it shut down ;-)
