Wake and suspend machines on local Ethernet LAN
Suppose you have a spare PC (say A) that supports Wake-on-LAN, you can first enable it by following this guide. Then you can hack on some scripts on other local machines connected through Ethernet to remotely control A to make it suspend/hibernate and wake up as you want.
Wake
To wake up A is simple. Suppose A’s MAC address is 11:aa:22:bb:33:cc and the hostname is “machine-a”, and you want to wake it up from other machines (e.g. Machine B) on LAN, first install the wakeonlan utility (on Machine B).
On Debian/Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install etherwake
or:
$ sudo apt-get install wakeonlan
On Fedora/RHEL:
$ sudo apt-get install net-tools
On OS X:
$ brew install wakeonlan
To send magic Wake-on-LAN packets to A:
$ etherwake 11:aa:22:bb:33:cc
or:
$ ether-wake 11:aa:22:bb:33:cc
or:
$ wakeonlan 11:aa:22:bb:33:cc
Suspend/hibernate
Configure static IP for Machine A, for example 192.168.0.201.
Edit /etc/hosts on Machine B by adding the following line:
192.168.0.201 machine-aSetup SSH server on Machine A.
Create a user account (say “yourname”) on Machine A for SSH login
Configure public and private keys for SSH login without password
Install pm-utils on Machine A.
Edit /etc/sudoers on Machine A to add the following line:
yourname ALL=(root) PASSWD:ALL, NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
- Install GNU Screen on A.
Then, you can use the following script suspend_machine_a.sh on Machine B to remote suspend Machine A:
#!/bin/bash
session_name="suspend"
ssh yourname@machine-a "if screen -list | grep -E '\<[0-9]+\.$session_name\>' >/dev/null;
then echo -n ''; else screen -dmS $session_name; fi"
ssh -t yourname@machine-a "screen -S $session_name -p 0 -X stuff 'sudo pm-suspend
'
"
To use hibernate, substitute pm-hibernate for pm-suspend.
Finally, you can make some shortcut aliases so that suspend/wake of Machine A can be done by a single command.