Server and S3 standby

[Mahoney]

I have a Windows 2003 Small Business Server, for both SageTV and email and eventually web and source control.

At the moment it's always on. I doubt it actually needs to be on more than 3 hours a day, so this seems a needless waste of electricity. I know Sage can wake it to do recordings - but should it be able to wake due to network activity? For instance, if someone sends me an email, and the router tries to pass it on through to the server (which has a static IP on my local network)? Or if the MVP is turned on?

[gplasky]

Look at the Power Management properties on your network card through Device Manager. You can usually set it to allow to bring the computer out of standby. But that would probably be for ANY network activity so I wonder how much it will sleep. I would of put Sage on it's own machine. My 2 cents.

Gerry

[GKusnick]

This is getting somewhat off-topic, but if you have email coming directly to your server, I would think you'd want to leave it up all the time, so the sending server doesn't have to wait around while you come out of standby. Email servers are meant to be online 24/7.

Sage and email on the same server sounds like an iffy combo to me anyway. I'd hate to have a recording garbled because some spammer decided to mail-bomb me during prime time.

[Mahoney]

if you have email coming directly to your server, I would think you'd want to leave it up all the time, so the sending server doesn't have to wait around while you come out of standby. Email servers are meant to be online 24/7

I thought that was probably the case, thanks. It's behind a router and a modem, both of which are meant to protect against DOS attacks so hopefully that won't be an issue; though the modem seems to have developed a habit of needing periodic rebooting, which is not good considering it's meant to be receiving email at all times. Running my own email server may prove to be an error...

[GKusnick]

Getting even further off-topic, but if you have router/modem reliability issues, check this out:

http://dataprobe.com/power/iboot.html

This is a gizmo that sits behind your router and pings some address of your choice out on the net. If the ping doesn't get through for some configurable length of time, it can power-cycle the router/modem/whatever to reboot them. Very handy if you need that server to stay online while you're out of town.

[dagar]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

I thought that was probably the case, thanks. It's behind a router and a modem, both of which are meant to protect against DOS attacks so hopefully that won't be an issue; though the modem seems to have developed a habit of needing periodic rebooting, which is not good considering it's meant to be receiving email at all times. Running my own email server may prove to be an error...

Remember: holes in your firewall are just that, holes. i.e. 'port forwarding' that is unless you run a Juniper Netscreen with deep packet inspection (DPI) or a Secure Networks Sidewinder G2 with application proxying. Otherwise ... uh, dude; you expose your Windoze server to the innernet don't do that unless you know what you're doing from a systems security perspective and particularly with knowledge on E2K/E2K3 boxes (or Sendmail).

The modem doesn't protect you from anything. Unless you unplug it