[Gllug] Is this a silly idea?

[John Winters]

For a long time now, I've run a home server with various peripherals
spread around my house and study.  I've put a little bit of effort into
reducing power consumption because it's on all the time - currently I
have a 1 GHz Mini-ITX board which has relatively low consumption, but
it's also a bit too slow for some purposes.

It's occurred to me to try an alternative approach.  I envisage two
boxes - one a fairly powerful server which is actually switched off most
of the time.  The second a very low power unit (probably a disk-less,
500 MHz Mini-ITX also functioning as firewall and print server) which
wakes up the main box using Wake On Lan when needed.

"When needed" can be defined as when another box is turned on on the
local LAN (DHCP request), when I try to connect from the outside world,
at a specified time in the night (to do file downloads and housekeeping)
and possibly as a future enhancement, when I want a television program
recording.

Now before I start re-inventing the wheel - has anyone used or come
across a configuration like this before?

TIA,
John

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