Wake-on-LAN and Power Usage

Critiques of the requirement to leave a computer running 24/7 lead to discussions on energy efficiency and remote wake capabilities. Users share solutions using Wake-on-LAN (WOL) via routers or Raspberry Pis to turn on powerful machines only when needed. Others mention macOS settings like `caffeinate` or specific power configurations to ensure the host machine remains accessible without wasting electricity around the clock.

To avoid the energy waste and noise of keeping high-powered hardware running 24/7, many tech enthusiasts rely on Wake-on-LAN (WOL) strategies, utilizing low-power routers or custom SSH proxies to trigger beefy workstations only when needed. While some argue that modern small form factor devices like the Mac Studio are efficient enough to idle indefinitely, others share creative software workarounds involving macOS commands like `caffeinate` or mobile scripts to balance remote accessibility with environmental concerns. The discussion highlights a persistent technical divide between those who successfully automate their power cycles and those who still struggle with the hardware limitations and configuration hurdles of waking machines remotely.

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Similar, except I use a 10 year old surface pro 3. But I have to have a mechanical keyboard, so it's not exactly portable, but I can work from anywhere

I have no interest in LLM, or vibe code. Even though I miss the capabilities of intellij, nvim can fill the roll in the terminal very nicely, except rust analyzer filling up storage fast,

I also have a spare mobile, which I use to wake the computer up. And I have a python script running on it, to shutdown the computer in case of power failure.

After initial hiccups it working pretty well, except cats turning off the router, well how many can use the excuse that I couldn't finish the work because cat controls your network. LoL

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If you don't want to run your machine 24/7 (whether for electrical consumption, environmental, noise, etc reasons), I wrote an ssh proxy [1] that will send WOL packets to a target machine and hold your connection until its alive.

I then configured debian-autoshutdown [2] to turn the machine off if there's no traffic on ssh after 15 minutes.

This way I just ssh into my machine (whether via antigravity on my laptop or termius on my phone) and within 30 or so seconds its awake, no physical button presses needed. I documented the whole flow in more detail on my blog [3].

I'm now working on an improvement called machine on proxy (or mop) that will allow me to start Proxmox VMs instead of physical machines, so I can let gemini-cli run wild and if it decides to wipe the entire hard drive I can restore from a snapshot.

[1] https://github.com/simonamdev/ssh-wol-proxy

[2] https://github.com/mnul/debian-autoshutdown

[3] https://www.simonam.dev/ssh-wol-proxy/

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I do the same. I can SSH into my router at home (which is on 24/7), then issue a WOL request to my dev machine to turn it on.

You don't even have to fully shut down you dev machine, you can allow it to go into stand-by. For that it needs to be wired by cable to LAN, and configured to leave the NIC powered on on stand-by. You can then wake up the device remotely via a WOL magic packet. Maybe this is possible with WLAN too, but I have never tried.

Also, you don't need a Tailscale or other VPN account. You can just use SSH + tunneling, or enable a VPN on your router (and usually enjoy hardware acceleration too!). I happen to have a static IP at home, but you can use a dynamic DNS client on your router to achieve the same effect.

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I run a lot of small form factor (SFF) machines including NUCs, Minisforums, and a Mac Studio.

At idle, they aren't loud or consuming much electricity compared to sleep/shutdown.

Fruit co devices in particular are extremely efficient; the Studio is rated at 6W idle, 145W max consumption (cf. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102027 )

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Can you do the same to remotely wake up my MacBook on demand via WoL and ssh into it from my phone? What are the security risks?

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I don't think WOL works over Wi-Fi and whether you can get WOL from a USB ethernet adapter.

My proxy doesn't attempt to handle security. Most folks use either Tailscale or some other VPN solution. In my case I use the wireguard server in my router to VPN into home which gives me access to the proxy and consequently to the machine.

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Same setup as mine, I have an OpenVPN server running in my router, and my main PC has wake-on-lan and a KVM as a backup to turn it on and off.

I have an old used Dell Latitude that I use as a pseudo thin client. I ssh into my PC, and everything just works.

I really like this setup because I only have one environment, so everything is there, and I don't have to install anything in the laptop

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If you're on Android and can download QPython, it works just fine and has for years. This seems way overcomplicated, it depends on a remote computer that's on 24/7? Ick.

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Sadly I'm an iPhone kid - and yeah the 24/7 computer running is not ideal. It's been nice building on the server that I'm using to host the app, but then again I could just run the Dockerfiles via QPython and push the code via git?

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been using the same setup for the past 2-3 months now. My company gave the employees old mac pro (intel) for free to use for whatever purpose they want to. I was using AWS for most of my personal projects which I have now migrated to this mac. I use the app 'Amphetamine' to not let the mac sleep, and rest of the setups are the same with Tailscale + termius etc

Fun fact: once you get ssh access to mac, you can control almost anything running on it. Like I added my mac air under termius, and I could mute/unmute any videos playing on chrome using osascript from my iphone :)

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"2. Make sure your computer is ON and UNLOCKED
When disconnecting/reconnecting power, make sure you unlock the computer. I've ran into this issue one too many times."

- this is the biggest problem that needs to be solved

- i dont want to keep my computer running 24x7 wasting power for stuff like this

- why not make a robotic arm that you keep at the computer table which can use open cv to plug the computer on when required?

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Lookup "wake-on-lan".

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I'm not sure why I'm having so much difficulty with it, but I've never been able to get this to work on my machines despite my searching.

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This is awesome! But I don't think you need to say never to all those display settings. You just need to go to Battery -> Options, and "Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off", and wake for network access when on power adapter.

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to keep your mac awake:

caffeinate -di

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Thank you! Did not know about this command before - good to know

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