Use edgerouter to power up a server over LAN ???

[Bob Vance]

So I have my edgerouter X and a server running ubuntu LTE plugged to a UPS. I have all the scripts in place to carry out graceful shutdown of the server before the battery is depleted.

My question is - how do I power the server back up when power is restored? Does it make sense to have the edgerouter send WOL packetsall the time, say, 10 mins apart - this way when power is restored, the routers boots up and sends a WOL to the server no later than 10 mins after the fact. How do I configure this in EdgeOS? Is there a more elegant way about this?

Thanks!!!

 

[System Error Message]

So I have my edgerouter X and a server running ubuntu LTE plugged to a UPS. I have all the scripts in place to carry out graceful shutdown of the server before the battery is depleted.

My question is - how do I power the server back up when power is restored? Does it make sense to have the edgerouter send WOL packetsall the time, say, 10 mins apart - this way when power is restored, the routers boots up and sends a WOL to the server no later than 10 mins after the fact. How do I configure this in EdgeOS? Is there a more elegant way about this?

Thanks!!!

First if the edgerouter reboots when there is power you can script through there, otherwise what you do is set them to sleep when the battery is low rather than depleted. WOL does work from shut off but it depends on the NIC as well.

So test it out, shutdown the edgerouter, pull out the plug, plug it back in. The problem here is that the battery may not be fully depleted resulting in the edgerouter not rebooting back up. Therefore it is better to put the server to sleep and allow the battery to finish effectively cutting power and setting the server's motherboard to power on on power detected.

Some fun notes, you can acoomplish this with a raspberry pi 2. The raspberry pi 2 should be able to take power from both USB and GPIO so you can attach a battery to it and i suggested the pi 2 because of its power efficiency or basically very low power drain, so if the network is switched, you can check if the raspberry pi 2 can see the server and send a WOL or use SNMP to tell whether or not the server has a network link for WOL. The point is that you can attach a huge battery to it and it will power it for days but better yet you can insert a few cases such as is the server off but the raspberry pi is running and there is main power as told by the UPS. Although you can do this using the edgerouter it is a jack of all trades master of none and theres no ensurance that it may boot up vs the raspberry pi that you can just let to power off from lack of power rather than telling it to shutdown and it has a very low power consumption especially if you dont connect anything else to it.

 

[Bob Vance]

Thank you for all the pointers, these make a ton of sense!!! Plenty to consider here...