Need product suggestions for remote power cycle-ing a server

[assemblage]

I've got my old computer running as a server at my house. Sometimes it gets turned off by a power outage. When there is a power failure, usually the power will fail, then resume for a few seconds, fail, resume, then fail for a while. Since I'd rather wait until the power problem gets fixed before I restart the server, I've turned off the automatic reboot feature in the bios.

However, when the power goes out I have no way of remotely turning it back on. How can I solve this problem? Surely there's a way to remotely turn on and off a commputer.

I looked on newegg and found this StarTech PCM815SHNA 8 Outlet Remote Power Switch - RS232 Interface for $400. But that's crazy expensive for my purposes. I only have one computer that needs it.

Anyone have any experience or ideas about more inexpensive products for remote power management?

Thanks!

 

[alaricljs]

With my server I use WOL (wake on lan) and I have a Linksys WRT54GS with OpenWRT running (it's a replacement firmware) This allows me to ssh into my firewall, and then send the WOL packet to my server. Waaaay cheaper than a remote power device.

 

[assemblage]

Hi and thanks for th einfo, I'm using the Linksys WRT54G router with the DD-WRT firmware. This page here. says I can get external SSH access. I read on Coding Horror, that DD-WRT can do WoL from the gui. However, I couldn't find that from the documentation, but did find a tutorial on how to configure port forwarding to send a magic packet from the internet/outside the router. depicus.com has some free tools for that and here's a C# code snippet for those programitcally inclined.

I have an Intel gigabit network card (PWLA8391GT I think), which should have WoL. My case is the first Antec Sonata version, so that power supply should be WoL capable. Motherboard is Aopen AK77-600N and it's specs says it has a WoL capability... and yep the board map in the manual does show a WoL connector/jumper thingie. But I don't see any jumper/connections on the Intel Card pictures. To use WoL, do I need to attach some kind of cable from the network card to the motherboard?

And to make sure I'm straight, WoL will wake up a computer from cold, not from sleep mode or hibernation, but from a power off state?

Thanks!

 

[assemblage]

I dug a little more and found that if the PCI bus is v2.2, then it should do WoL through the PCI bus and a cable isn't needed.

 

[alaricljs]

WOL will wake the machine from any state that is configured in the BIOS (mine for instance is set to all power states).

As to the connections required... You can use the on-board NIC if you have switch port space (don't need an IP assigned). The Intel NIC probably has the WOL via PCI lines and your mobo needs to support that, needless to say they never tell you whether it does or not. Otherwise you'd need a NIC that has the 3 WOL lines exported via header so you can connect a cable between the card and the mobo WOL header.

And whichever OS you're running you need to allow WOL via the driver as well!

The DD-WRT on the other hand I don't know about. I use OpenWRT White Russian .9 with x-wrt Web interface (as found on x-wrt.org) and there is a WOL page in the interface that allows using either ether-wake or wol. This gives you the ability to use either of the 2 most common WOL packet formats.