[ale] Running a hands off remote Linux installation

Michael H. Warfield mhw at WittsEnd.com
Tue Jul 31 11:38:50 EDT 2012


On Tue, 2012-07-31 at 10:21 -0400, Jim Lynch wrote:
> On 07/31/2012 09:45 AM, Matthew wrote:
> > a PDU with power rebooter is what you need.
> How does that solve the need to press the power button to power the 
> system back on when you've done a shutdown?

Depending heavily on the system and the BIO, you may have 3 "Power
Recovery" options when coming back from a power failure.

* Power Off
* Last State
* Always Power On

Sounds like you need option #3 if your system supports it.

Is this a rack mount server or are you sticking a desktop / tower system
somewhere?

Someone mentioned the AMT module.  That's the Intel Active Management
Technology module.  A lot of modern rack mount equipment has these
things but, most of the time, they haven't been enabled.  There's all
kinds of gotcha's in setting them up securely for distant remote
control, however, and it's generally recommended they be accessible only
from the local network.

Another option if your server doesn't have an AMT, and doesn't support
the Always Power On BIO option, would be to drop a little firmware based
device, like a cheap Linux based router or a Rasberry Pie or something,
that doesn't need to be on backup but will recover when power recovers
and can be connected to remotely.  Then you use it with Wake-On-Lan,
which a tower or a rack server SHOULD support, especially if it has on
MB network interfaces.  Power comes back on, you just connect into your
little interface and use ether-wake to wake up your server.  Wake-On-Lan
uses a non-routable packet so you have to have some sort of minimal live
device on the local network to the interface that has Wake-On-Lan
enabled.

The little box could, if it has a serial port (or USB port that will
take a serial dongle), double as a serial console for when you really
get things hosed up.  :-P  You could get away under $100 that way.

Another option is that some servers and BIOS support timed wakeups.
You'll have to explore your BIOS for that and I've never played with it
personally.

OTOH...  If your box you want to remote doesn't even support Wake-On-Lan
(which has to be enabled in the BIOS as well) you probably should look
at a better box.  Champagne taste on a beer budget only goes so far.

Regards,
Mike
 
> Thanks,
> Jim.
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-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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