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Well ain’t it all a bit nasty? You are at work and you left some important files on your home pc because you were working on it last night. You are starting to pull out your hair because you now either need to drive back to fetch it or do all your hard work again.

But not any more. We arrived in this new millennium and we want to automate everything as much as possible. (Well my inner geek at least )

Let’s start with enabling Wake-on-LAN (WOL) on your home pc.

Well Wake-on-LAN already states it. You will need to boot from a LAN machine in order to make this work. I use my router to be able to do this trick. It is a Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT flashed on it. It will allow me to log in with ssh or putty and load the webinterface so I can wake up my pc. In this case an Asus P5K-E.

Before we can boot this baby we need to make sure WOL is enabled in the BIOS. So boot it and get into the bios by pressing whatever button you need to at startup.
Start to look for something like Wake-on-LAN or PME (Power Management Event) in your BIOS. Depending on your hardware it will have different settings. In my case I had to enable PME events on PCIE devices as my ethernet was a PCIE device.

After enabling it save your settings and boot into windows. (used for this example, for linux do a bit of research on the net)
With the most common options you only need to do a proper shutdown from windows in order to make your WOL work. In some cases you will have to do some extra work by configuring your ethernet device. I have some screenshots of this event from the control panel.

So go to your network connections. Right click on your connection and open the properties. Then configure your network adapter and search for Wake from Shutdown / Wake-on-LAN or something similar and enable it. Also make sure that your wake-up options is set to ‘Magic Packet’ and not ‘Pattern Matching’. It caused my pc to boot when I did not want it to boot. After that shutdown your machine and try to boot it from LAN. There are a lot of programs out in the wild being capable of sending magic packets across the network. For debian based machines there are etherwake /wakeonlan and for windows winwake / magic packet sender. A bit of searching on the net might get you some of the wake-up clients you need. Have fun!

After I used my energy meter on my monitor I found out it used a total of ~75W to display all kinds of neat stuff on my screen. Because it was a CRT I decided it was time for something new. So I ordered this new monitor with a specified power usage of 45W max. Well this baby is going to earn itself back while I will also get some more space on my desk.

Specifications

Ok I wasn’t actually looking into saving a quick buck but well good things happen sometimes.

I bought this meter to measure how much power an electronic device uses. I was especially interested in my new VIA Epia board. It measured a mere 17W average after booting. I was quite satisfied by the results at this point. (Via Epia EK8000EG, 1GB Kingston RAM, Samsung 2.5″ 120GB hdd)

Less satisfied I was with my printer, a HP 7310 which apparently still used 9W while being turned off completely. Quite angry I pulled the electrical cord, no more power flowed towards this device now. A short click was the last response it gave to my action…

Last week I finally received my new hardware. Eager to get it all running I started with the base install of Debian (4.0).

First I installed the subversion server as follows:

1. run ‘apt-get install subversion’
2. run ‘svnadmin create /path/to/repository’
3. update the config files in /path/to/repository/conf
4. create a start script for the svnserve daemon, containing something like: ‘svnserve -d -r /path/to/repository/’
5. wow it works!

Installing Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL 5 was also really easy.

1. run ‘apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server-5.0 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql’

Installing Tomcat was a bit harder. I first installed lynx so I could download jdk 1.5 from java.sun.com. After downloading it I installed it into /opt. After that I created a symbolic link from /opt/java pointing to the jdk 1.5 folder. After that setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable to it and exporting JAVA_HOME/bin to the path.

After that I also downloaded the Tomcat 5.5 tar.gz file and untarred it into the /opt directory on the harddrive. After that I created a similar symbolic link to /opt/tomcat referring to the tomcat install location. After that I tested the install and it worked ok. Because I didn’t want to run Tomcat as root I created a tomcat user and modified the startup script to run as the tomcat user using the ‘su -p tomcat’ command.

Ordered a Via mainboard today with some other stuff which I will use for my new 24/7 server.

It will be running debian with the following programs:

• Apache Http Server
• PHP
• MySQL
• Tomcat
• Subversion
• Local Maven Repository
• And some other useful stuff like rsync

Product Specification