Power saving

[dinki]

I've got two XP desktops that are on 24/7. One is my main computer and the other is the SageTV server. I'd like to put them in some sort of sleep/hibernate/whatyacallit mode to save a little on power costs. I've attempted doing this _many_ years ago and did not have very good success.

The Sage machine obviously needs to be able to wake up and record shows, update guide etc. I do occasionally connect to it via SageTV Placeshifter while I am at work. Will it be easy to get it to wake when it receives the network signal that I want to watch tv remotely? Same thing for connecting to the web server to schedule recordings, will it spring back to life and serve my pages?

My main machine also controls my x10 devices via serial port and I also often remote desktop in on this box from work. Can I expect it to answer?

Sorry to ask such basic questions but I've never really found the answers I was looking for and I'm kind of scared to set this up and not have my machines respond to outside input.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[brewston]

Hiya

I've got some experience of this. It boils down to 2 things, does your PC support WOL (Wake on Lan) ?and have you a facility to send the WOL packet from the internet ?

Setting up WOL is fairly easy as long as your NIC supports it, test it at home to satisfy yourself that the PC will wake up reliably when the WOL packet is sent from a machine on your own home network.

Generally routers will ignore WOL packets incoming from outside. To get around this, I found some custom firmware for my Netgear DG34G router which allows me to log in from the internet (Remote admin needs to be enabled on the router to allow this ) and send the WOL packet on my own network (ie it doesn't originate from the internet) I'm sure similar firmware exist for other vendor routers

Sage will wake to record shows, you don't need WOL for that

Tim