July 2008 Archives

Most modern computers with a wired network adapter in them can accept a Wake-on-LAN signal which will  power up the computer if it is off, asleep, or hibernated.  It's a combination of the NIC's MAC address (which is a low-level hardware address, which is unique across all network adapters out there), and some other voodoo, combined into an Ethernet frame commonly known as a "Magic Packet".

I thought, hey, this would be a great thing to help you shave off even more of the electricity footprint of your always-on computers.  I know a lot of us might like to keep our desktops powered on, just in case we need access to them remotely.

So how about this?

• You put your computer to sleep when you leave for the day. Sleep modes routinely use <10W of power relative to the 100+W when it's fully powered on. 
• Go to a site like www.remotewakeup.com, enter your IP address and MAC Address, send the Magic Packet to your computer to take it out of sleep mode (or power it on).
• Do the work you needed to do remotely
• Put the computer back to sleep

Say your computer used 100W when fully on and 10W when asleep.  If your computer is on 24x7, that's 16.8kWh per week.  If your computer is only on during business hours and asleep the rest of the time, that's 5.7kWh per week, a savings of 66%!  If you shut your computer off at night, you can bump that savings up to 75%.

Congratulations; you just saved the planet.

Will you try to configure Wake-On-LAN and invoke the Magic Packet?  Hit the comments with your experience!

So what do you do when you're Major Nelson, the voice of the Xbox Live community, and you're covering one of the largest media events for the Electronic Entertainment Industry, and you're stuck with a paltry uplink from your hotel to the internet, and you've got tons of video and content that you've got to push through that pipe up to the Xbox Live Mothership?

How do you go from piddling to 5.5/4.8Mb Up/Down in less than 12 hours?

You call this dude, Mark (links below are from the Original MajorNelson blog post).

From the 1 Gbps feed on the rooftop of an apartment building across the freeway we used a custom 2.4 Ghz mesh radio to get from one part of the roof to another.  One of these devices also acted as the NAT router/firewall.  From the corner of the apartment building roof to you we used Ligowave 5 Ghz point to point radios that are built into the panel antennas.  All of the traffic from the Hotel to the 1 Gbps feed was encrypted by using a VPN which the radios do naturally.  The apartment roof is part of a 1 Gbps ring around downtown Los Angeles using Freespace optics (ie lasers) which terminates in a building which houses the largest carrier hotel/interconnect point in Southern California.  Their normal use is to provide internet and VOIP to tenants in the apartment buildings.

Now that's what I call Guerilla Networking!  Why not recruit this guy to configure the networking for "that really big MBA simulational thingie"?

Awesome.