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I have Debian Wheezy 7.2 running on a HP Thin Client. This little box acts as a file server and is only used from time to time, so I don't want it to run 24/7 but it has to be available when it's needed, without any action to be taken in advance (sending a WOL packet or something). It has also an Apache Server on it, so there might be some access from outside anytime and it has to be available then.

So I thought I suspend it after X minutes of inactivity and resume it as soon as there is LAN activity. The suspend part works well with pm-hibernate but how do I bring it back up when there is access to it?

Alex
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  • I am confused you want the box to wake on lan activty but not use wake-on-lan packets? – dfc Jan 08 '14 at 23:01

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I don't think that there is anyway to achieve what you want within a single PC. AFAIK there is no way for standard LAN traffic to trigger a wake-up event (only a 'magic' WOL packet).

The only way I could imagine this working were if you had a very low power computer (like a Raspberry Pi or similar) running all the time and acting sort of like a reverse proxy for your server. So when that receives LAN traffic it first sends a 'magic' WOL packet, then forwards the other LAN traffic to your (waking) server. Theoretically that should work, but I imagine that the devil would be in the detail...

Also it probably begs the question, why not just use the Raspi as a file server/web server instead of introducing all that complexity...

Jeremy Davis
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