Remotely power on/off computer. Is it possible?

[cencal2235]

I want to be able to start with everything shut down, not in sleep mode, and power the computer up to start my Plex dockers and such so people can use the Plex shares in the event that I am not home to power it up and get caught with it off. 

 

Not sure this is easily possible . 

 

I have thought of extending the wires to the case switch and then wiring to some type of Alexa device that could work like a momentary switch to power up and a latching relay to hold "switch" for the seconds required to power down. Not sure how a power down like that would affect unRAID though.

 

I have also thought of some sort of mechanical actuator to physically push the power button. lol Not sure about that one yet. 

 

I travel a lot and my family moochers may want access when I am gone, or even I may myself. Seems a better solution that leaving it on for a long period if nobody is home and using it. 

[spdelope]

I mean servers are supposed to be on 24/7 but you can use a smart plug like a kasa hs105 or something like that. And make sure there's a setting in bios to turn on after getting power restored. Then, when you want to turn it on, just reset the outlet. 

Edited September 13, 2022 by spdelope

[MAM59]

Turning it on remotely is not big deal, use a smart plug.

 

But turning it off is really complicated. If you just switch off the smart plug, UNRAID has no chance to clean up. On reboot the array will be in suspicious state, the parity will be invalid. This forces a loooooong rebuild (if I say loooong I mean for several hours,even days maybe depending on size and speed).

So you really want to avoid this.

 

For shutting down you could use a 2nd smart Plug like a shelly-1 (with a simple relay that has a potential free contact). You could connect this relay to the on/off button of you motherboard and program it to "autooff in 5s". If you trigger this remotely your unraid has pressed the on/off button for 5s and start a graceful shutdown.

 

If the first smartplug for the main power has a powermeter, you could monitor it waiting for a significant drop in power consumption. This shows the shutdown is finished, UNRAID can take quite a long time for this. Afterwards you can safely shut off this plug too.

 

I'm a Shelly Fan (because they also work without a cloud, are rather cheap and very good quality), I would recommend a Shelly Plus 1PM (with power meter) or a Shelly Plug-S (ready build with power meter) for Plug 1 and a cheap Shelly 1 (no PM!) for the On/Off Switch.

 

(I am lazy;, I even wrote me a script running on my router (that is always on of course) which monitors the power consumption of several Shellys and switches them off completly if they go below a certain level)

 

 

[Kilrah]

Second the smart plug. For power off some can automatically turn off when power is < some value, so you'd set that to like 5W then issue power off commands from unraid UI, once it's properly shut down the plug will turn off, which would signal users they can power it on again if needed.

 

But yeah, should probably just be on 24/7.

Edited September 13, 2022 by Kilrah