Hi all

I know that servers are meant to be going continually but at home here I am trying to save on electricity use and presently I have 3 servers running 24-7.

Is it possible to automate a server to come on at a certain time and shut down at a certain time automatically??

I'd love some help or advice if it is possible.
I'm not a newbie to Linux, but I'm no expert either

Any help will be thankfully and gladly accepted

Well to shutdown you could us a cronjob.
For starting the computer you could try using Wake On Lan feature, if present.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

Some BIOSes have the option to wake a system up at a certain time.

And else a simple timer clock in the server's powercord; you know, those old mechanical ones where you put little pins in to set starttime and endtime. Only put a pin in for the starttime.

Thanks guys

Some good ideas there thanks

I have played with various combinations of power-down, suspend and the BIOS RTC wake-up features. Testing the BIOS is critical and a real pain to debug: Set the alarm, shutdown, wait (an hope) for the machine to power up again and, hopefully, not shut down again immediately. Also consider what would happen if there is a power outage at wakeup time.

MythTV can be configured to shut the machine down, setting the alarm to wake the machine up N minutes before the next scheduled recording, or a fixed time, whichever comes first. I have used it and it works reliably once the wrinkles have been ironed out. They have a number of Wiki pages on the subject under "shutdown/wakeup".

I have my 04:00 "overnight batches" set a flag meaning "don't shut down yet", run the batches, then remove the flag and, optionally, set the RTC alarm to wake up at 03:58, just in time to run the next batch and shut down again. The BIOS is set to power the machine up if power is resumed. Great for vacations. Ran reliably for 3 months unattended without missing a TV recording.

The interface you want is either /proc/acpi/alarm (older) or /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm (since kernel-2-6-22). The MythTV page is at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup and has plenty of examples.

Have fun,
--DaveG