ACPI Suspend for server

[Jago25_98]

I'm using an old ~1ghz system as a low use server. I've already replaced the heatsink for something fanless and set the hdparm shutdown to 15mins. This is more to protect the hardware than save energy.

The thing is, the HD running the root partition just gets woken up again. This is an old system so I'm worried running a hard drive all the time could lead to wearing it out. This isn't a very essential server but I feel I should do what I can to keep it reliable and reduce energy consumption if I can.

The BIOs supports wake on LAN but for that I'd need to send a magic packet to it and I don't think I can do that since it's behind a very basic residential ADSL router. Also that seems a bit over complicated.

I could set a timer RTC so that it's only running half of the day but then I run a slightly higher risk of it not booting correctly and also I would prefer to be able to access it at any point.

Is it possible to put the thing into suspend and it will wake up if I ping it?

The BIOs mentions ACPI and "LIPC". I set ACPI auto shutdown to 1min as a test but this did nothing. There's also an option for "Wake on Ring" but I believe this is for modems.


p.s. 2 more problems now. First, connecting to WiFi on the command line isn't very easy. I have wpa_cli but that appears to need this fix, which isn't helping:
http://ebixio.com/blog/2011/09/15/how-t ... in-ubuntu/

So I thought I would try Powerline networking but that has stopped working too:
http://darrenwatt.com/resetting-comtren ... omment-339

So then I thought I'd install cnetworkmanager but I need to find the Sabayon way of doing this because it's offline and emerge would I assume be way too slow:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Networkless_Maintenance