Energy savings and Wake-on-LAN

[KryptoNyte]

My goal here is to get the Sage HD300 extender to wake my Sage server.

Machine motherboard is a Gigabyte z68ma-d2h-b3.

This Win7 Home prem 64bit machine is running WMC7 and SageTV7 in tandem. WMC7 is using a Ceton InfiniTV4 PCIe tuner, which bridges the on-motherboard-nic. Because of the bridge, I was not able to enable a wake-on-lan feature with the on-board nic and/or bridge, so I purchased this standalone nic as a workaround:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I moved the cable from the mobo nic to the Intel NIC, booted the machine and successfully installed drivers straight from Intel download.

I then proceeded to enable the motherboard "Wake on PME event" as well as all the wake functions on the Intel NIC (including wake on magic packet). I downloaded a wake on magic packet windows program, and even one Android (for when my phone is connected to the LAN), and enabled "wake timers" in the win7 64bit power management advanced settings.

I do have my DLINK router setup to assign "reserved" IP addresses to all devices that connect to it, including the SageTV Server and the HD300's, and I do not currently have any MAC filtering enabled.

Once this machine goes to sleep, it would appear that there is no way that I can forcibly awake it, nothing is working - not the HD300's, not the magic packet software from phone or another windows machine ... nothing wakes it.

I'm about out of idears at this point.

[KryptoNyte]

A few clarifications:

- The machine does properly wake from sleep to record TV programs via Sage
- The machine does wake from sleep with mouse/keyboard activity
- The BIOS has sleep set for S3

[Fuzzy]

There is a windows command line program called powercfg.exe that can help determine if either of your LAN cards are wake-capable, and more importantly, wake_armed.

[KryptoNyte]

That's helpful, thanks Fuzzy. I'll report back once I have a chance to diagnose a bit more.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

A few clarifications:

- The machine does properly wake from sleep to record TV programs via Sage
- The machine does wake from sleep with mouse/keyboard activity
- The BIOS has sleep set for S3

- Did you enable the BIOS to support S3 before or after installing Windows? I recall there were issues when enabling the power management feature after installing Windows.

- Are you sure your router allow packet forwarding for Subnet Directed Broadcasts? That could be your issue if you have your server and your extender connected to the same router's switch and the router doesn't support this feature.

- You should make sure whether your server's NIC can parse the WOL packet correctly by running the WOL monitor on your server and the WOL sender on another machine, both software can be found HERE

Eddy

[KryptoNyte]

Thanks, Eddy. I'll have to wait until the weekend to check it out at this point. Had some really strange results this week ...

[wayner]

How much power does your PC use when idle and are you sure sleeping saves enough to make it worth your while?

My newest PC which has an i5-2500K CPU uses 37W when idle (and 110W when stressed). If sleeping meant that it slept 20 hours per day then you would be saving about 700Wh - or about $0.14/day using $0.20 /kWH as my power cost and asusming 2W when sleeping.

On the other hand some of my older PCs with E8400 CPUs use about 100W when idle.

[KryptoNyte]

I'm not really sure, wayner, I'll have to hook up the meter and check that out. The machine is heavily overclocked, but as I recall, I got it stable without locking the processor speed down, so the CPU still scales back when not in use.

[KryptoNyte]

I wish I knew what I did to get it this way, but it seems to be working fine at this point.