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Microsoft's Sleep Proxy Lowers PC Energy Use
alphadogg writes "Microsoft researchers have slashed desktop energy use with a sleep proxy system that maintains a PC's network presence even when it is turned off or put into standby mode. Microsoft has deployed the sleep proxy system to more than 50 active users in the Building 99 research facility in Redmond, Wash., according to the Microsoft Research Web site and a paper that will be presented at the Usenix technical conference in Boston later this month. ... Sleep proxies allow machines to be turned off while keeping them connected to the network, waking the machines when a user or IT administrator attempts to access them remotely."
This is something new? Isn't this basically just wake on lan with an external box? Meaning that rather than having a part of the computer powered on in case the packet to wake up comes through, they're doing it with an external box. I'm a bit curious as to why this justifies any particular coverage.
Hmm, now who else has had such a system?
Syndrome identified:
Any feature even remotely similar, but found on Apple products, means that Macs have been doing it 'for some time now' even if what the Mac is doing is just the crap built into the bios of every motherboard made for the last decade, and doesnt solve any of the real problems that this new solution is solving.
"His name was James Damore."
So every user has to install a driver? Even Joe Plumber trying to access your invoice history web server?
You just dont seem to get it.
"His name was James Damore."
This means that it's the router that traps a request for your computer, and send a WOL first.
So then, it doesnt solve the problem?
Is that router going to wake the machine for pings? Really? Thats gonna save energy... not. Sure, block all pings then? Yeah.. then you can't ping the machine...
You, sir, are exhibiting the syndrome precisely. You are imagining that the Apple "solution" solves the problem, but it doesnt even come close.
The apple "solution" just ignores the problem, essentially its Wake On Lan. Big Fucking Deal. Apple has a wireless Wake On Demand. Nobody Fucking Cares because It Doesnt Solve The Problem.
"His name was James Damore."
MAC stands for Media Access Control.
"Machine Address Code" my ass...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If you read the fine article, you will see that they acknowledge wake on lan and other similar work. They are addressing a practical problem in large networks. Classic implementations of Wake-on-Lan wake the computer when another computer sends it a packet. This looks fine in theory, "my computer wakes up when it has something to do," but it does not work well in practice, in a large network.
In any network of a certain size, there is a lot of noise, scans, keep alive traffic. That traffic causes packets to be received frequently, maybe a couple times per minutes. When a computer awakes, it takes some time to put it back to sleep, maybe a minute. Given enough background traffic, the computer never goes to sleep.
The solution is some form of filter, to only wake up the computer if the incoming data packet is "important." For that, you need a proxy. And the proxy needs a lot of tuning. If it does not wake up on "important" traffic, the users are pissed. If it wakes up too often for trivial pings, the energy bill increases. What they claim here is that after a year of trial, they have validated a particular tuning that works well. Seems interesting indeed.