Sunday, November 27, 2022

Configure OpenBSD for remote server rarely used

Hi all,

OpenBSD is amazing. But I need help in configuring it correctly as a remote server, rarely used.


The main thing I am trying to do is to make it sleep every now and then to protect resources. I am very flexible on how to do this, but have been unable to do so.
Here's what I tried :

1) Make it sleep and wake up when woken up remotely
I investigated Wake On Lan, which I enabled via ifconfig. However, this system is deployed remotely, and I have no access to other computers on the LAN, so I am unable to make this work.

2) Make it sleep for a few hours and then wake up
After 3hours+ of research in man pages and the internet, I have not seen any solution for that.

3) hard drives Spin down, CPU lower freq

I have been able to lower the CPU speed by running `apm -L`.
I haven't been able to spin down the hard drives.
How important is it to manually send a command to spin down the unused harddrives? Will it be down by the system automatically?

I am trying to get info on the drives from the system but `atactl sd0 checkpower ` always shows `standby` even after I have just written on the disk. I understand this does not work because my drives are SCSI and not ATA.
I read the man page for scsi, and I see the command to spin down hard drives : `scsi -f /dev/rsd2c -c "1b 0 0 0 0 0"`
However, I see no command to spin them back up. Is it automatic?
How can I request information on the spin state of the drive. I am just a little worried about starting to send low levels instructions to the hard drive, with little understanding of it. Is it safe to send this command?

Thanks all !


PS : dmesg : I cannot share the full dmesg for security reasons, but it is a fairly standard i386 machine, with 2 drives mounted as SCSI.

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