Wake on demand possible?`

[maglin]

Irony is the amount of time that you would devote to try to implement this auto on/ auto off would probably be worth enough money to pay to keep the server on 24/7 for probably 8 years. If you don't put a value on your time then....... I recommend you evaluate if you even need a NAS. An external HDD attached to your router would probably be more what you are looking for.

 

[Ganzir]

Really. I actually *gave* you the formula that others use to implement this sort of thing.

I do not see, where you provided this link in one of your previous comments. Aside from the fact that this is for Mac.

So basically you want some magic protocol that tells windows there is a share available on a server that's off, and then you want to wait for it to boot to be accessible....

No I was more or less thinking about something like this:

http://engbarth.es/?page_id=175

I will test If this works with FreeNAS and than the only quesitons that remains is, can in power down after a certain period in which no access occurs?

...

An external harddrive is not an option, since when this thing fails all data is lost and that is precisely why I am opting for a NAS

 

[pirateghost]

I do not see, where you provided this link in one of your previous comments. Aside from the fact that this is for Mac.



No I was more or less thinking about something like this:

http://engbarth.es/?page_id=175

I will test If this works with FreeNAS and than the only quesitons that remains is, can in power down after a certain period in which no access occurs?

I know what a WOL packet is.

It seems you don't understand the concept here....

Your server cannot advertise itself as a fileshare in any effing way, if it is powered off. Full stop.

What you are really trying to do is just send a WOL packet to wake the server up, which has already been mentioned several times that this is possible but highly NOT recommended for a stable server.

It sounds like you don't need FreeNAS at all but just a computer in the network that you can abuse. FreeNAS is not intended to be shut down as frequently as you want, and you WILL shorten the lifespan of your components doing this.

It's remarkable that people simply will not accept the advice of others when asked for and given that advice.

 

[anodos]

I do not see, where you provided this link in one of your previous comments. Aside from the fact that this is for Mac.



No I was more or less thinking about something like this:

http://engbarth.es/?page_id=175

I will test If this works with FreeNAS and than the only quesitons that remains is, can in power down after a certain period in which no access occurs?

...

An external harddrive is not an option, since when this thing fails all data is lost and that is precisely why I am opting for a NAS

Perhaps a better middle ground is to spin-down your hard drives. Alternatively, you can install a hardware RAID controller in your PC and have it handle redundancy for you. This would probably be cheaper and fit better with what you want to do.

 

[jgreco]

I do not see, where you provided this link in one of your previous comments. Aside from the fact that this is for Mac.

I'm pretty frakkin' sure I said:

You'd need a proxy that announced share availability to the network and then when accessed would start the NAS.

This is the only technically feasible recipe I can think of for doing what you describe with CIFS or NFS as things stand today. It's short, it's sweet.

The only significant working example I can think of that implements something like this is Apple's implementation, which Apple was actually able to make work for their own protocols, because they've got a high degree of control over all their hardware.

Obviously I didn't provide that link in a previous comment because it isn't ACTUALLY a solution to your problem. I gave you the theoretical solution to your problem and then you had the testicular fortitude to say

However, from your comments I gather, you are not really in the mood to provide substantial support.

so at that point, I felt I needed to point out that I actually *had* given you what little support was possible, and since you're apparently not processing what people are saying in this thread, I included a link to a similar technology to what you're asking for.

The fact that I'm not able to actually give you a FreeNAS+CIFS+Windows implementation of this isn't my fault, but I'm dinging you a warning for the manner in which you're treating the people who are trying to tell you why you're not going to be able to do what you hoped for. Some of us are happy to discuss the technical side of all this at great length, even if it's only hypothetical, but the attitude you've injected isn't helpful.

Brighten up and we're happy to help you understand the issues here.

 

[danb35]

Perhaps a better middle ground is to spin-down your hard drives.

QFT. This still isn't very easy in FreeNAS, but I understand it's at least a technical possibility.
@Ganzir, the problem is that what you're trying to do simply isn't technically possible. The best you could do is manually tell the machine to spin up, and then program it to power down after a certain period of inactivity (and no, there's no built-in mechanism in FreeNAS to do this, and I have no idea how you'd write one--but it would at least be theoretically possible. What is technically possible is to have the server powered up, but have the drives spin down on inactivity. With careful component selection (e.g., a C2750 board, not too many drives, no 10G card), your idle power usage can be around 15-20 watts, which isn't too bad.

 

[AlainD]

...

Of course you could achieve similar energy savings by unscrewing a few lightbulbs.

Well as most my bulbs are either 4 watt or 6 watt LED's and run approx. 4 hours a day, this wouldn't get you far. Let's say 1 watt for a 24/7 server per bulb.

 

[jgreco]

Well as most my bulbs are either 4 watt or 6 watt LED's and run approx. 4 hours a day, this wouldn't get you far. Let's say 1 watt for a 24/7 server per bulb.

Probably made more of a diff in the days of incandescent light bulbs.

 

[anodos]

Probably made more of a diff in the days of incandescent light bulbs.

The last of my incandescent bulbs burned out last night. Now I'm waiting for about 5-6 CFL bulbs to burn out and I'll have switched to 100% LED. Yay.

 

[jgreco]

The last of my incandescent bulbs burned out last night. Now I'm waiting for about 5-6 CFL bulbs to burn out and I'll have switched to 100% LED. Yay.

I probably still have a hundred incandescent light bulbs sitting new-in-carton out in the garage. I basically skipped the CFL craze and held on to incandescents until dimmable LED's became available, as we've got a ton of Insteon dimmers. The early dimmable LED's aren't that great, though, and even now we get a bit of a "pop-on" effect which I don't care for.

Figure I'll wait for grandkids and dazzle them with all sorts of stupid light bulb tricks...

 

[Mirfster]

Just wire a light switch directly to the outlet; connect said FreeNas server directly to the outlet; set System BIOS "Power On" after power loss. Whenever you want the share flip the switch when done flip it off...

WOL = Wake On Light Switch...

 

[AlainD]

Probably made more of a diff in the days of incandescent light bulbs.

Yes, but technology has changed that. I wanted to show that energy use in households and appliances is an issue for a lot of people, maybe more in Europe that in other regions. There are rules for standby use defined (1watt max.).

A low energy usage NAS secure is an important "market".


BTW. Also in cooled datacenters the energy cost is a bigger and bigger concern.

 

[AlainD]

I probably still have a hundred incandescent light bulbs sitting new-in-carton out in the garage. I basically skipped the CFL craze and held on to incandescents until dimmable LED's became available, as we've got a ton of Insteon dimmers. The early dimmable LED's aren't that great, though, and even now we get a bit of a "pop-on" effect which I don't care for.

Figure I'll wait for grandkids and dazzle them with all sorts of stupid light bulb tricks...

Not an easy situation, even dimmable LED's want a different type of dimmer than most "older" dimmers.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Yes, but technology has changed that. I wanted to show that energy use in households and appliances is an issue for a lot of people, maybe more in Europe that in other regions. There are rules for standby use defined (1watt max.).

A low energy usage NAS secure is an important "market".


BTW. Also in cooled datacenters the energy cost is a bigger and bigger concern.

That is why they don't cool them anymore. They just crank the fans up and blow more air through the system.

 

[jgreco]

Yes, but technology has changed that. I wanted to show that energy use in households and appliances is an issue for a lot of people, maybe more in Europe that in other regions. There are rules for standby use defined (1watt max.).

A low energy usage NAS secure is an important "market".

One that NAS in general has some trouble with, and that FreeNAS isn't able to address particularly easily at the moment, because it is based on ZFS, which means "big hungry server."

I've been operating relatively-low-wattage NAS units for years. Units such as the iomega StorCenter IX2-DL take a handful of (~6-8) watts to power the system, but didn't offer substantial performance (Marvell 6282, 256MB, etc). The problem we needed to solve was bottom tier shared storage, and the fact of it is, four of those and 2TB drives gave us 6TB of RAID1 iSCSI storage, which cost a total of maybe $1200, or $200/TB. That was ~2011-2012.

Those are getting long in tooth and FreeNAS isn't really competitive pricewise, so I'm in the midst of replacing those with some Synology DS416Slim units. They're still not *great* performers, but they're pretty reasonable, plus with four drive bays, plus *tiny*:

which being a SoC based NAS is also very low power. Putting two crap-grade 960GB SSD's and two Spinpoint M9T's in each one, so we'll have four of them with 8TB of HDD and 4TB of SSD, and total project cost is around $3500, or around $300/TB. Which is more expensive, but, hey, SSD, more space, redundant ethernet, faster, ..... not bad.

By way of comparison, the high performance FreeNAS based ZFS VM filer was costing maybe $7K to deliver 7TB of usable space which will absolutely decimate those little guys, but it is delivering half the space at twice the cost and three times the energy consumption. I had been hoping to avoid another round of SoC based NAS units but things still aren't quite "there" for FreeNAS.

Each of these solutions has their own benefits and downsides, and if energy consumption is a primary consideration, one of the smaller SoC based devices might be a better choice, just because there's no need for lots of RAM and lots of CPU there, and there are companies specializing in building those. FreeNAS is built out of standard server components.

BTW. Also in cooled datacenters the energy cost is a bigger and bigger concern.

Haven't seen that to be exactly true. Our datacenter footprint has shrunk over the years while the complexity of the environment has increased. Thanks, virtualization. But in general the demand for data center space seems to be growing even with things like cloud being an an alternative-of-sorts. I sometimes wander around Equinix and kinda wish I had a little genie that could tell me what a given bit of gear was contributing to the world.

 

[jgreco]

Not an easy situation, even dimmable LED's want a different type of dimmer than most "older" dimmers.

Well, what's really needed is a different system for running bulbs. All this 120V AC stuff is kinda wasteful, but the world tends to gravitate towards least common denominator solutions.

 

[AlainD]

One that NAS in general has some trouble with, and that FreeNAS isn't able to address particularly easily at the moment, because it is based on ZFS, which means "big hungry server."

I've been operating relatively-low-wattage NAS units for years. Units such as the iomega StorCenter IX2-DL take a handful of (~6-8) watts to power the system, but didn't offer substantial performance (Marvell 6282, 256MB, etc). The problem we needed to solve was bottom tier shared storage, and the fact of it is, four of those and 2TB drives gave us 6TB of RAID1 iSCSI storage, which cost a total of maybe $1200, or $200/TB. That was ~2011-2012.

Those are getting long in tooth and FreeNAS isn't really competitive pricewise, so I'm in the midst of replacing those with some Synology DS416Slim units. They're still not *great* performers, but they're pretty reasonable, plus with four drive bays, plus *tiny*:

which being a SoC based NAS is also very low power. Putting two crap-grade 960GB SSD's and two Spinpoint M9T's in each one, so we'll have four of them with 8TB of HDD and 4TB of SSD, and total project cost is around $3500, or around $300/TB. Which is more expensive, but, hey, SSD, more space, redundant ethernet, faster, ..... not bad.

By way of comparison, the high performance FreeNAS based ZFS VM filer was costing maybe $7K to deliver 7TB of usable space which will absolutely decimate those little guys, but it is delivering half the space at twice the cost and three times the energy consumption. I had been hoping to avoid another round of SoC based NAS units but things still aren't quite "there" for FreeNAS.

Each of these solutions has their own benefits and downsides, and if energy consumption is a primary consideration, one of the smaller SoC based devices might be a better choice, just because there's no need for lots of RAM and lots of CPU there, and there are companies specializing in building those. FreeNAS is built out of standard server components.



Haven't seen that to be exactly true. Our datacenter footprint has shrunk over the years while the complexity of the environment has increased. Thanks, virtualization. But in general the demand for data center space seems to be growing even with things like cloud being an an alternative-of-sorts. I sometimes wander around Equinix and kinda wish I had a little genie that could tell me what a given bit of gear was contributing to the world.

The Synology DS416Slim seems really nice, but a bit over the top for my usage scenario.

Thanks, I was looking to renew my FreeNAS backup system to add 2 SSD's in mirror as a "work NAS disk" , but now I'm looking to a cheap NAS with just the two SSD's and keep my FreeNAS purely as a backup server. Looking at the DS216J or DS216se, strangely the cheaper slower DS216se has a far longer SSD compability list. I would only use it for CIFS file sharing, but I want low response times, therefore a SSD.

 

[jgreco]

The Synology DS416Slim seems really nice, but a bit over the top for my usage scenario.

That's hard to avoid these days. These devices are all primarily defined and differentiated by their software, and there's very little incremental cost to adding features that you've already developed for one model across an entire product line.

This was true even five years ago, when the iomega StorCenter IX2-DL's we used offered two 3.5" bays, a gigE, and could serve iSCSI, AFP, NFS, CIFS, and had support for "personal cloud", Amazon S3 backup, AXIS video camera hosting, rsync backups, local media server, lockal print server, Time Machine, and torrenting. A lot of this was bleedover from their higher end products, so you could get a wealth of features in a $100 NAS unit.

The $300 price for the DS416slim seems a bit high but when viewed as a complete package including the software it's probably reasonable. I can afford to view it like that because I want the small footprint and the ability to get 16 2.5" drives (4 x DS416slim) onto the same rack shelf that currently holds the IX2-DL's.

Thanks, I was looking to renew my FreeNAS backup system to add 2 SSD's in mirror as a "work NAS disk" , but now I'm looking to a cheap NAS with just the two SSD's and keep my FreeNAS purely as a backup server. Looking at the DS216J or DS216se, strangely the cheaper slower DS216se has a far longer SSD compability list. I would only use it for CIFS file sharing, but I want low response times, therefore a SSD.

I'm not sure I'd get too OCD about SSD compatibility lists. Most of these devices are little Linux SoC devices and the problem is that there are so many brands of SSD/HDD out there, that it rapidly becomes impossible to validate all possible combinations. The DS216se probably has a longer list simply because it's been out for about six months longer. The J is probably a better device, with better CPU, more RAM, USB3, and iSCSI.

 

[ethereal]

w

 

[AlainD]

That's hard to avoid these days. These devices are all primarily defined and differentiated by their software, and there's very little incremental cost to adding features that you've already developed for one model across an entire product line.

This was true even five years ago, when the iomega StorCenter IX2-DL's we used offered two 3.5" bays, a gigE, and could serve iSCSI, AFP, NFS, CIFS, and had support for "personal cloud", Amazon S3 backup, AXIS video camera hosting, rsync backups, local media server, lockal print server, Time Machine, and torrenting. A lot of this was bleedover from their higher end products, so you could get a wealth of features in a $100 NAS unit.

The $300 price for the DS416slim seems a bit high but when viewed as a complete package including the software it's probably reasonable. I can afford to view it like that because I want the small footprint and the ability to get 16 2.5" drives (4 x DS416slim) onto the same rack shelf that currently holds the IX2-DL's.



I'm not sure I'd get too OCD about SSD compatibility lists. Most of these devices are little Linux SoC devices and the problem is that there are so many brands of SSD/HDD out there, that it rapidly becomes impossible to validate all possible combinations. The DS216se probably has a longer list simply because it's been out for about six months longer. The J is probably a better device, with better CPU, more RAM, USB3, and iSCSI.

Thanks for you're time.

I fully understand you're use case and I was thinking about the exrta hardware in the DS416slim (dual Ghz link, 4 bays) and for me at home double the cost against the DS216J ;-) --> at work I would indeed suggest the DS416slim over the DS216J just for that extra hardware.

I hadn't looked at the introduction date and that explains the difference probably, thanks for the info. The DS216j has indeed better hardware it's a little bit fast and for me especially the usb3. I use external usb 3 ssd's quite a lot when not at home, nice short duration temp storage.