gharris999 wrote: 
> @epoch1970: you've got my vote for an entry in -The Annals of
> Counter-Intuitive Engineering- for your method of turning on a PC by
> cutting off the power!
Ah yes. I thought so highly of this mundane Dimension 3000, having spent
an honest working life, and still able to serve in a new era as a zfs
backup robot. 
Turns out it's quirky as hell: it wols from S3 and S5, but only from the
integrated fast ethernet card :( And it can RTC wake from S3, but not
from S5. (kernels 2.6 or 3.2, no dice)
To circumvent the 1st problem, I am using the integrated interface for
WOL only, and an intel PCI Giga interface for all the rest. I tried
bonding both interfaces (in "HA mode"… there is no "Old Wreck"
mode), but WOL did not work. Under Debian I found ifmetric, a package
that allows to specify priorities between interfaces on the same subnet.
I gave the WOL interface a low priority, by specifying a large integer
;) This seems to be working, I need to give an IP to the WOL interface
but besides that it does not create redundant routes. 
I remember having done this once using iproute (to allow concurrent
activation of a wireless and a wired interface, and silently pick the
fastest.) Ip route is probably the way to go, but the info I gathered
from internet was really confusing. Ifmetric was easy, I'll see if it
holds up.

As for the second problem, this is really funny. I use a Gembird
usb-controlled smart plug. Plug it to a pc, compile sispmctl, and you
can start your own PC controlled light show, over 4 power plugs. I use 2
to power external sata enclosures (in need 10 drives overall). The
device was not overly expensive (2 or 3 years ROI in my use-case), and
it has enough brains to run a small http interface, and more importantly
it has a clock (with limitations: about 160 days ahead seems a limit for
an alarm; The clock seems precise but the API only allows HH:MM, no
secs.) BTW, this thing has one huge, gaping flaw: in itself it consumes
over 20W (might be even 28, I don't remember exactly.) So it might be
green, but only if it saves a lot of idle load.
I use it like this: when the PC suspends or shuts down, the external
bays get programmed to shutdown 2 minutes after that, and if there is an
RTC wake programmed I also let them thaw the drives for 2 minutes before
wake-up. (This delay eases on the dreadful resets sent by the cheap SATA
port-multiplier controller when drives appear/disappear.)
When I found out the issue with RTC wake, I decided to plug the PC
itself on one of the programmable ports. So when it goes to shutdown,
the PC programs its own power plug to off->on power at the RTC date.
With the adequate BIOS setting, the PC boots at the expected time. 
There is one slight issue, though. In case I WOL the PC out of schedule,
it could go kamikaze without warning. So I have set early in the boot
process (usb capability seems available very early, luckily) a command
to erase all scheduling in the power strip. But a seizure is still
possible.

(Sorry for the long message. I thought you might enjoy some details.)


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