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A comment on Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way.

Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by HankB99 on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:08AM (#35627673)
Diagrams are just visible enough that I can tell that they're present but I cannot otherwise see them. I suppose that's because I'm using a dark theme on Firefox.

Not that it matters. There's enough text to figure out what's going on in the first place and it would not help me much in any case.

I have a file server running of an ancient server motherboard from another age. (Supermicro X8SIL w/X3460 and 16GB ECC RAM) It uses just about 95W idle and bumps to about 150W when the drives (5 HDDs) are being scrubbed. I tried suspending the server and power dropped to about 75W - not a huge saving.

Another concern is drive longevity. Starting and stopping repeatedly during the day is a lot harder on them than running continuously and could lead to premature drive failure. I could explore this if my server were SSD based but it is not.

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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by cmeacham98 on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:11AM (#35627707)
I'm not using any dark theme addons or similar, just the standard prefers-color-scheme, and I have the same problem. So they just didn't account for their website's dark mode when writing the article.
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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by themaninthedark on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:22AM (#35627802)
Windows dark theme here and I had the same problem.

I clicked the light mode on the website and then back to dark mode and it was fixed. So their website is reading your theme and adjusting the background correctly but fails to adjust the test and diagrams.

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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by notRobot on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:38AM (#35627990)
Highlighting the diagram makes it readable.
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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by danieg on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @10:51AM (#35628852)
Author here, apologies for the dark mode issue and thanks for flagging it -- looks to be an open bug in theme-ui (https://github.com/system-ui/theme-ui/issues/1602).

I've just pushed a workaround that appears to have fixed it.

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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by V__ on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @05:26PM (#35633514)
I wrote it a bit further down, but another solution is to use SVG's with stroke='currentColor' instead. This value uses the inherited text-color and would therefore always work.
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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by notRobot on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:38AM (#35627989)
Highlighting the diagram makes it readable.
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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by michielderhaeg on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:18AM (#35627768)
If I switch to the light theme and back again, the diagrams become white and readable.
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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by V__ on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:36AM (#35627975)
He is inverting the embedded SVG's colors using CSS. However, that CSS is JavaScript applied and doesn't trigger on page load. SVG offers a nice 'currentColor' color value, which resolves to the inherited text-color. Replacing stroke='#000000' with stroke='currentColor' would solve this bug without requiring any JS.
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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by foepys on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @09:22AM (#35627808)
Sometimes servers don't actually go into deep suspend modes because of proprietary management interfaces. Disabling those in the BIOS can result in huge savings.
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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by PragmaticPulp on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @10:16AM (#35628456)
> I tried suspending the server and power dropped to about 75W - not a huge saving.

This doesn’t sound like it’s actually suspending. Or it may have left the drives spinning. Server gear usually isn’t optimized for actually sleeping. Workstation boards are much more likely to work.

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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by ornornor on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @01:11PM (#35630683)
That sounds like a lot. I have a HP Z440 with a Xeon e5-2650v4 (24 cores) with 128GB RAM, 2x8TB spinning rust, 1x PCIe SSD, and another SATA SSD that’s idling at 70W. When it’s rubbing the drives, it goes to around 100W. Running proxmox.

The machine without most of the drives and 32GB RAM cost me about 250$ used.

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Re:Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on dema... by oceanplexian on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @01:23PM (#35630804)
It's his CPU (X3460). They are quite ancient and were known for being power hungry (Nehalem). Even a move up to a $15 Broadwell chip would improve energy efficiency dramatically. The motherboard probably doesn't even support sleep states like S2/S3.
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