Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Configuring Power Management (Sun Blades Only)

Configuring Power Management (Sun Blades Only)

by Jeff Hunter, Sr. Database Administrator

Hard drive and system power management are adjustable with the dtpower application with Solaris 8 7/01 release and higher. However, the power management features were not present in Solaris 8 10/00 and Solaris 8 1/01 releases. By default, power management is enabled on all new Sun Blade systems. (I really wish Sun would change this!)

When the system is in low-power mode, the hard drive eventually spins down to conserve power. Later, when you perform a task that accesses the hard drive, the hard drive spins up again. You might have to wait a few seconds for the hard drive to spin up to full speed. If you find that the delay is inconvenient, you can turn off Energy Star power management using one of the two methods provided below:

Method #1

You can disable the Energy Star power management feature by using the dtpower application.

Login as the "root" account and at the system prompt type:

# /usr/openwin/bin/dtpower

The dtpower application is displayed.

Under the Current power saving scheme menu, select Disabled.

Press the OK button.


Method #2

The main configuration file for controller Power Management is /etc/power.conf.

As the root user ID, edit the /etc/power.conf file as follows to disable all Automatic Power Management:

# # Copyright (c) 1996 - 2001 by Sun Microsystems, Inc. # All rights reserved. # #pragma ident   "@(#)power.conf 1.14    99/10/18 SMI" # # Power Management Configuration File #  # Statefile     Path statefile               /usr/.CPR   # Auto-Shutdown Idle(min)       Start/Finish(hh:mm)     Behavior autoshutdown    30              9:00 9:00       noshutdown  device-dependency-property removable-media /dev/fb autopm          disable  system-threshold                always-on

Run the command:

# /usr/sbin/pmconfig

This utility is run from the command line after manual changes have been made to the /etc/power.conf file. For editing changes made to the /etc/power.conf file to take effect, users must run pmconfig.

pmconfig is also run at each system boot.

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