Microsoft's Sleep Proxy Lowers PC Energy Use 163
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."
Re:Give them a break (Score:5, Interesting)
Reinventing something that's been available for years is not 'coming up with good technologies'.
Now what they SHOULD have done is just cache the MAC of the PC in AD along with the rest of the object (It might already be there as part of the auth stuff) and then mod the remote access client to try and ping first, no reply? Send a Wake on Lan packet.
great for botnets (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wake on Lan? (Score:5, Interesting)
Macs have the option to Wake on Demand [apple.com] which requires the use of an Airport base station but seems to follow the same basic concept.
Macs actually implement the Wake On LAN [wikipedia.org] standard feature. (sometimes referred to as WOMP, or Wake On Magic Packet) This relies on the computer's ethernet hardware remaining awake while the computer sleeps, and any computer on the LAN can send a special UDP packet containing its ethernet MAC (Machine Address Code, unrelated to MACintosh) to trigger the computer to wake up. The only Apple-specific part of this feature is that Apple extended it to wireless use, keeping wifi hardware also active and listening for the magic packet so computers could be woke up wirelessly. Come to think of it thought, WOMP over wireless does require an Airport base station and Mac ethernet adapters - Apple extended the WOMP specs (in an open way) but I think are the only ones presently implementing it?
Looks like Microsoft yet again attempts to take credit for "inventing" something that we've all been using for years. This time it wasn't even ripped off from Apple, it's been in use on all manner of PCs for some time now. This is just MS's first specific support in their OS?
I see a comment immediately below, "it'd be silly to set up a 2nd machine running 24/7 so that I could turn mine off a few hours a day"..... Actually, that's exactly how you wake up machines on different networks such as waking up a work machine from home. Unless your server is asleep too I don't see this being an issue? Remote into it, use it to WOMP your workstation, and then connect to it? Even if you don't have a server, surely keeping one machine awake to provide access to many other machines (easily tens to hundreds) is hardly a hardship.