Sleep / Standby

[bigbill]

I want to lower my electric bills, they are starting to get out of hand. All my walwarts are on power strips now, I've replaced every bulb in the house with CF, I even replaced my xmas lights with LED's.
I want to start experimenting with putting my two Sagetv boxes to sleep, the primary and encoder machines. I have read the .pdf, checked the faq and searched this forum. After all that I am still wondering if I am going to get burned..
Couple questions.
If my "encoder" box goes into standby will my primary still be able to schedule records?
If my primary is in standby mode, will my encoder box be able to send the show data to the drive on the primary?
If anyone knows where the gotcha's are documented let me know. -Bill

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by bigbill

I want to lower my electric bills, they are starting to get out of hand. All my walwarts are on power strips now, I've replaced every bulb in the house with CF, I even replaced my xmas lights with LED's.

LED Christmas Lights are sweet

I want to start experimenting with putting my two Sagetv boxes to sleep, the primary and encoder machines. I have read the .pdf, checked the faq and searched this forum. After all that I am still wondering if I am going to get burned..
Couple questions.
If my "encoder" box goes into standby will my primary still be able to schedule records?

It will schedule them, but my gut reaction is that it won't be able to record anything when the encoder box is asleep.

If my primary is in standby mode, will my encoder box be able to send the show data to the drive on the primary?

The thing you have to realize is that the encoder machine is dumb, it doesn't have any smarts in it at all, it just sits there and does whatever the main server tells it. So if it won't do anything if the server is asleep.

Frankly, I think the best solution is to combine the two, first you'll about halve the power usage just by doing that. And second you won't have issues with two machines sleeping/waking. I just see that as being problematic. My guess is either the server won't be able to wake the encoder if it's asleep, or the "keepalive" communication between them will prevent either from sleeping.

[bigbill]

I guess standby wasn't so smart on the encoder, I can't even ping the box now... I just bought one of the mediasmart WHS boxes to replace my encoder box (369.99 with a coupon code at the HP store) so I will move the two HVR950's from the existing encoder to that and maybe move the HDPVR and Sat box out there too. Are there any good writeups on the extender boxes? I might want to replace the PC next to my HDTV with something smaller than a pc that uses less power if they are viable..

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by bigbill

I guess standby wasn't so smart on the encoder, I can't even ping the box now...

That's a OS thing, Sage has no control over it. You normally can't ping a box that's in S3 or hibernation. The only way it would work is if the encoder box were configured for Wake On Lan. In that case, Sage would have to be smart enough to send a WOL packet (or the box to wake on any packet).

[bigbill]

So whats the consensus on putting the primary server to sleep? Will Sagetv consistantly wake the PC up to record a show? Any other gotcha's been discussed in the past?

[steven017]

I've never had any trouble with mine. I've got it set to wake up a few minutes before scheduled recordings.

By the way, I know you've already moved away from the idea, but here's another suggestion for your encoder box. If you know, for example, that you don't record shows at specific times of the day, such as in the middle of the night, you can use the task scheduler to put your computer into standby and then wake it up later.

I do this with my box, which I'm using for multiple purposes. I have it set to shut off at 12 am, come back on at 8 am, turn off again at 2 pm, and then come back on at 8 pm. That can potentially save me 14 hours of power usage per day, unless I have recordings scheduled or wake it manually. Anyways, it's just a thought if you wanted to configure your box to sleep at particular times.

Steven

[bigbill]

That sounds like it might work for me. So what do you schedule in task manager? And how do you wake it up twice in a day? I hope I'm not missing something obvious.

[steven017]

Well, really, it's not complicated, I suppose. I'm just making use of features that are built in. Basically, I'm taking advantage of how the Power Management settings in Windows.

If you're not too familiar with manipulating Power Management settings from the command line, take a look at this post I wrote previously: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30408.

So, here's what I do to put my PC into sleep mode: set the power management settings to put the computer into STANDBY (S3) after 5 minutes. I do this by adding this line, "c:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe -change steve -standby-timeout-ac 5", to a batch file. I use the Task Scheduler to run this batch file every day at the times I want (or 5 minutes before) to put my PC to sleep.

To resume from standby, I use the Task Scheduler again. This time I use it to trigger a batch file that changes my power management to disable sleep mode (example, c:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe -change steve -standby-timeout-ac 0). This will wake the PC up if you set the option in the task scheduler "Wake the computer to run this task." Doing this also means that your PC will not go into Standby mode until you change this option again.

Now, the caveats. This will work as long as you don't have any programs running that create activity that prevent your machine from entering Standby mode. I have Skype on my box, and it will do this every time. So, if you've got anything like this, or it doesn't seem to be working, you may need to create scripts/batch files to close and open those apps to get this to work. But you can schedule those too .

Sorry for the long-winded post. Hope it helps.

Steven

[brewston]

I use this for scheduling sleep/wakeup :

http://www.dennisbabkin.com/php/download.php?what=WOSB