The various sleep daemons drive me nuts. Most are linked to your window manager or screen saver, and none of them seem to really respect remote logins.
I have a few machines that I log into and do development and testing, but I don't need them up 24/7. So I rolled LazyLinux. It watches idle time and will sleep when X has been idle for a configurable amount of time UNLESS there is an active connection on SSH (actually its based on a configurable port, but you get the idea). When the session terminates the machine will sleep.
You can also ask that LazyLinux got to bed immediately.
Just a handy tool that works for me, thought I would share.
Source is available at https://github.com/traetox/LazyLinux under GPLv2
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