Site Downtime

[Player0]

Site was down for a couple hours this afternoon (it never goes down when I'm home). PC seems to have froze, but it rebooted with ease. Thankfully the wifey is at home. This raises an interesting concern though. If neither of us are home and the pc freezes, how am I gonna reboot it?

Does anyone know a way to remotely reboot a PC? There must be some sort of device for this.

Also, I need to put this PC in a new case. A large ATX case which has good air cooling properties. We're getting in to the summer months, and I need a big roomie case with lots of fans to insure this thing doesnt crash. Can anyone donate a case like this, or offer me a good price on one? Dont need a PSU with it unless you have a good quality one you'd like to donate.

I'm still hoping to get a second server built. Maybe one of you DC guys can spare a folding server. Something with a 800mhz+ CPU, and all the ram ye can spare :) I might even let yuo keep folding on that box on my electric bill if you can donate a system :)

[WesM63]

Hey tom,
Can't help ya much with the remote reboot issue.

I might be able to donate somemore hardware here next month or so. Depends on how things pan out. I'll let yah know thou. :D

[Drake]

Hey Tom,

If worse comes to worse and you have to buy a case, an aluminum matrix/dragon case runs about $60 in some trusted places.

[evilmatt]

hiya,

most of the ways I know of rebooting remotely require the pc to still be running.

one possible way of solving the problem would be to have a bit of external electronics wired to the reset that would act like a watchdog timer, ie it would reset the machine after it having been dead for a certain amount of time.

Maybe use a pic or something and have a timer running on it. You could conect it to the pc via the com port and have the pc periodicly poll it causing it to reset the timer.
So in theory if the pc were to hang for an extended period of time the watchdog would time out and trigger the reset.

Dunno if such a thing exists if not it should'nt be too hard to knock something together.

A possible problem, It would rely on some sort of app running on the machine that prevents the reset happening (a sort of run on brakes approach) so if that app doesn't run or gets interupted it will cause a reset when you dont want one.

Another approach might be to have a device able to reset it that is remotely accessable but that might be tricky suppose another pc could do it.

bit bored today, I'll go away now :silly:

[Synthohol]

wouldn't a wake on lan card work coupled with like pcanywhere?
on one of my nic cards, the link lite stays lit even if the power was off. i think if the bios allows it a remote boot will work by wake on lan. fwiw PSTN phones ring signal is at -90v DC a solenoid rigged on the power button would work if you calld it and the solenoid pushed the switch in? just a weird thought.

hey Tom, no BDC??

[Synthohol]

hey, check this out link (http://www.bootix.com/us/index.shtml)
for embedded systems (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Embedded/xp/evaluation/features/remoteboot.asp)

may need babblefish but looks promising! (http://www.blackboxnetworkservices.fi/remoteboot.htm)

[Player0]

Yeah its going to require some sort of embedded controller, like they ship on Dell/IBM servers. They are expensive though, and just not going to happen I'm afraid.

I just need to build a new server, thats all.