WARNING: THIS POST ASSUMES SOME PROGRAMMING KNOWLEDGE, as you will have to tweak it to your own setup. If you aren’t able to generally figure out what is going on in this post, you shouldn’t try it. I take no responsibility to damage caused to your system! I wrote this post in a rush, so I may miss out basic steps.
In an attempt to conserve as much electricity as I can, I turn off my FreeNAS server whenever it’s not being used. Unfortunately, this was quite a tedious task to do manually. So, I used some scripting to automatically turn it on and off. The scripting for auto shutdown is done on the FreeNAS server, while auto wake up is done client-side.
Auto Shutdown
Using a cronjob, the FreeNAS server monitors a preset list of computers (via IP addresses). Once all the computers are off (i.e. no longer reachable on the network), it’ll turn itself off.
1) Create a file named shutdown.py with the following code: shutdown.py
2) Edit the IP addresses section with whichever computers you want to monitor in your network, e.g.:
###### IP addresses #####
# IP addresses go underneath this line, one on each line in the format: ip_list.append('x.x.x.x')
ip_list.append('192.168.1.2')
ip_list.append('192.168.1.3')
###### End IP addresses
3) Place the file somewhere on your server, and make sure it’s executable. You can make a file executable by SSH’ing into the FreeNAS server, and entering the command chmod +x /mnt/path/to/shutdown.py, changing /mnt/path/to/ to the directory that shutdown.py is in.
4) Create a cronjob to run the file. You can do this via the Web UI. For example, the following settings run the script every 5 minutes from 12am-5am. You can adjust this to your own liking.
Automatically Wake Up
Whenever any of the computers in the house are turned on, they send a Wake-on-LAN signal to the FreeNAS server and automatically mount the shares.
Mac OS
Python is required to run this script! Basically, these scripts will check every 3 minutes that the FreeNAS server is on, and that the network shares are mounted. If not, it will attempt to turn on the FreeNAS server (by sending WakeOnLAN) and mounting afp shares. Please feel free to edit the scripts as you see fit, or change the directories they are in, of course making the necessary changes.
1) Create the file com.hoongern.nasmounter.plist in /Users/<your username>/Library/LaunchAgents
2) Create the file nas.py in /Library/Scripts/. YOU HAVE TO EDIT the configuration in the script as required:
3) Restart your Mac. If I remember, launchctl should find the new task. You can run launchctl list and check if com.hoongern.nasmounter is listed. If it’s not, I can’t actually remember what to do. I don’t actually use Mac OS, you see…
Windows
To be honest, I haven’t written a script for Windows. Not that it should be hard at all – just use a similar python script, the Task Scheduler, and the “net use” command to mount Samba shares. If there’s enough interest, I can write it up and post it here – let me know!
Linux
Again, no script yet. Shouldn’t be difficult with a similar python script, cronjob, and the “mount” command to mount Samba/NFS shares.