power down USB

[Szilveszter Ciurdar]

I have a SATA drive in an ventilated external USB enclosure connected 24/7 to a NSLU2 running Debian arm (soon to be armel).  It has the filesystem on it so it stays on all the time.  It has
been up for a few months and I only reboot it after flashing the kernel. I don't forsee any problems of leaving it on all the time.

I also have an ALIX embedded firewall from Netgate with the intention of running OpenBSD on it.  I got it configured with pfsense since I don't have a CF reader yet.  From the pfsense webgui, I noticed that you can send Wake-on-LAN packets to machines on your network.  I'm going to be able to turn on my fast OpenBSD testbox this way and not have to leave it running all the time.

Is it possible to send WOL packets in OpenBSD?  If you have a similar setup, you can keep the drive in another machine with a WOL enabled NIC and use it on demand. 

> Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:27:44 -0800
> From: brakeb at gmail.com
> To: openbsd-newbies at sfobug.org
> Subject: power down USB
> 
> I have an ALIX box with two USB ports on it.  I plugged in an
> external, bus powered 160 GB drive.
> 
> Here is a scenario of what I'd like to do:
> 
> 1. I plug in the drive, OpenBSD senses the drive in the USB hub, and I
> can mount it.  Leave for work.
> 2. I'm at work.  I SSH in to the server, and mount the drive.  I
> transfer items off of it, and am done with the box.
> 3. I realize that leaving my little bus powered drive running all the
> time will only be detrimental, so I umount the drive, and issue a
> command that allows me to power off the USB port/hub it is plugged
> into, so as to save the drive.
> 4. Later, I realize I need to put something on the portable drive, so
> I SSH in and issue a command to power up the USB hub. OpenBSD
> re-senses the drive, and I can re-mount it.
> 
> Is this scenario possible with openbsd without console access, or
> rebooting the server?  Cause, you know, it would be nice to have...
> 
> I did read the name pages for usbhidctl(1), usbhidaction(1), uhid(4),
> uhidev(4), and usb(4).  Nothing mentioned power control...
> 
> Regards,
> Bryan Brake
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> Openbsd-newbies at sfobug.org
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