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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."
Because Apple did this years ago with their Airport Express routers, it allows the computer to sleep while offering a service on the network such as file sharing or ssh, the base station detects the incoming request and wakes the computer from sleep.
It's time for more innovation from Microsoft.
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As of Snow Leopard there is a service similar to 'Sleep Proxy' in the Bonjour (mDNS) protocol. I forgot what it was called and how to use it but it's somewhere in the docs that I read.
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So... Microsoft's "research" seems to come from reading competitor's product specifications: my AirPort Extreme has been doing this for my network of macs for ages now - ever since Snow Leopard came out.
This is WoL combined with a proxy. Whenever the target machine is asleep, the proxy continues to respond (in this case) to Bonjour requests. When someone attempts to actually connect to the machine, the proxy sends a WoL packet out and then when the original host wakes up, it will hear from the requesting host and proceed as normal.
The one thing that's a little weird about this is that the AirPort extreme will actually wake the target machine up every few hours to make sure it's still there.