Scheduled Power On of FreeNAS? Using RTC Alarm?

[TheWoo]

I’m running FreeNAS 9.3 on an ASRock E3C226D2I server board. As the system is mainly used for some scheduled backups (and occasional eBay sniping through jBidwatcher on Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox jail) it is most of the time of and only needs to be powered on at certain times (mainly to save on power).

Is there any method/option inside FreeNAS to start the system at certain times? The BIOS has the "Power On by RTC Alarm" set to "by OS", which should allow FreeBSD to take control. The always on IPMI Interface (computer inside the computer, which can be accessed through a browser GUI even the NAS is currently OFF) allows one to power on the system, but unfortunately has no scheduler. A very basic RTC alarm power on schedule is available in the BIOS, but that is somewhat inconveniently to access and has no calendar.

Ideas?

 

[jgreco]

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/acpi-wakeup-using-rtc.20830/

 

[TheWoo]

I came across that thread before, but didn't see any working solution in it...

 

[jgreco]

That's probably the current state of it. Just guessin' tho.

 

[daf]

Digging up this older post, I know this issue has been discussed several times in the past and a common statement is "freenas is an enterprise solution backup system and a scheduled shutdown / power up approach makes no sense ". I also read a lot of opinions from people who say it financially doesn't make sense to shut down the system at night since electricity doesn't cost much..

I don't need to have this discussion / these arguments once again, all I want is help to get the power cyling working on a freenas system.. And maybe it's not possible and in that case I will have to look further into software packages that do allow this

Still I would love to have this functionality added to my freenas system and I'm not sure how to get this done.
openmediavault (linux / debian) allows me to install a plugin that uses the rtc wake to power up the system at a scheduled time.
I also for the freebsd forum post above and it seems like there has not been any progress whatsoever on this particular apci option, so I guess a similar option as in openmediavault will not be added to freenas anytime soon (although I hope I'm wrong)

This leaves me to look for an alternative option: my supermicro mainboard has ipmi to remotely power up the system, however I want it to be done scheduled, and afaik there's no option to do that by using ipmi..

Another option would be to use wake on lan and have my router send a magic package every morning.. But as I see there's no WOL driver loaded in the freebsd kernel currenly and also my router doesn't support scheduled sending this package...

My BIOS doesn't allow me to schedule power up/down, however there'a some setting I can use to have it power up after power failure that I can use with a timer on my power plug.. But that is a less charming option.

Also it would be possible to have a usb device to have the system powered on using a timer.. but that also requires me to buy another apparatus and I don't want to do this..


Is there anyone who can give some advice on how to achieve this scheduled power up? And does someone know rtc wake up functionality will be added to freebsd / freenas anytime soon?

Thanks in advance..

 

[ChriZ]

If you have another system running, and since your motherboard has IPMI, you could run a script on that computer to turn freenas on, on a cron schedule
Something like

Code:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H freenasbmcIP -U username -P password chassis power on

Just an idea..

 

[daf]

Hi there, thanks for this idea!
Unfortunately I don't have another system running :/

Greetings,

Daf

 

[daf]

Hi there once again, what I did was flash my router to alternative firmware; compiles ipmitools from source and use that scheduled as mentioned above.
This allows me to start up the system without buying other machines / running other computers.... But still a rtc wake command in Freenas would be great :)