Reporting of power states for a network connected PC

Details Reporting of power states for a network connected PC Reporting of power states for a network connected PC

1998-02-19

2001-02-13

Etienne, Ario (Department: 2155)

Electrical computers and digital processing systems: support

Computer power control

Having power source monitoring

C713S300000, C709S224000, C709S203000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06189108

ABSTRACT:

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of network-connected personal computers and, in particular, to transfers of status and control information for such computers over the network.
BACKGROUND
With personal computers (PCs) being increasingly connected into networks to allow transfers of data among computers to occur, more operations such as maintenance and updating of applications and data collections are occurring over the network. As computers are also becoming essential to their users to perform their work it is desirable to shift the time when maintenance and updates occur to not interfere with productive work. Shifting the time for such activity is not an easy matter because the computers on the network (clients) are usually shut down at off hours and thus are unavailable to interact for maintenance and updating.
One solution to this problem has been wake up technology, such as IBM's Wake on LAN technology which supports special signaling over a network to cause a client to power itself up. The network manager may then perform various operations on the client.
A probem with this is that the client may not be turned off but may be powered up but locked in a loop or have other trouble that could be corrected by the network manager by for example reloading the operating system or a particular application program. This is just the type of activity that would desirably be handled off hours but, unfortunately no one is there available to report on machine status.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
While remote wakeup of client systems has made the network manager's support of client systems more convenient, it is limited in that there are six possible power states (for the generally followed Advanced Configuration and Power Interface or ACPI standard) that a system may be in at a given time. The network manager must generally force the system to power down (to move to a known from an unknown state) and then bring it up again to be sure of the current state. This takes time and may be ineffective if the system has a maintenance problem—one of the situations where it would be desirable to take action without user intervention.
Related patent application Ser. No. 09/024,231 filed Feb. 17, 1998 filed and entitled “Full Time Network Auxiliary for a Network Conected PC” describes logic for sending a signal indicating status information of the corresponding client computer to a network manager over the network. According to the present invention an auxiliary processor that communicates with the network adapter and is always on as a result of trickle power thereto analyzes selected events in the operation of the client system and deduces the power state from these events. Hence while there is normally no set of flags set to indicate power state, the auxiliary processor looks for events selected according to the invention to provide adequate basis for deducing the current state.
Through a connection to the network through a portion of the network adapter, which is also trickle powered to always be on, the auxiliary processor sends occasional signals in network format, preferably a periodic “heartbeat” signal, to the system manager indicating the current power state. This allows the network manager to perform operations without time consuming state transfers to get to a known state. Also, such state transfer operations that could create further problems for a wounded system or can't be forced, under the existing circumstances, may be avoided to permit more maintenance options.
Information of particular interest to the network manager is the power state of the client. There are four states defined for a PC conforming to the ACPI specification. These states, while being exclusive, are not detectable at a point in time. The present invention recognizes that the by monitoring certain events involving the operating system and the power to the system it is possible to deduce the current power state. Then according to a presently preferred implementation for the invention the current power information is broadcast over the network periodically to be available to the network master. With such information the network master has greater flexibility in performing maintenance and update operations on the client.
Preferably, the packets are sent out on a periodic basis (a heartbeat signal) to keep the network manager aware of the power status information. According to a preferred implementation, the signals are introduced to the client side of the “physical layer” of the network controller. That is the layer that conditions the packet signal to analog form to go out over the physical connecting network that is the LAN. By so configuring the packet to have the characteristics of a standard packet, it passes over the client's normal network connection and through the network as if a normal packet created by the client.


REFERENCES:
patent: 4750175 (1988-06-01), Brenneman et al.
patent: 5404544 (1995-04-01), Crayford
patent: 5594426 (1997-01-01), Ushijima et al.
patent: 5630049 (1997-05-01), Cardoza et al.

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