Forgive me if this is not an appropriate question for this thread. I have recently started using unraid connect so I can remote control and power down my server when not in use. The next thing I want to be able to do is power on the server when I’m at work for example so I can start watching something on plex then power down again with unraid connect. I have an ASUS W680 board, and have looked at IPMI and wake on lan, and both seem a bit confusing and not the cheapest and from what I can gather not entirely safe utilising those over the internet. My Nas is plugged into a smart plug that I can power on and off remotely and I saw this reference in a Linus video, so it is safe for me to enable the setting in the bios that boots the pc after power loss and then when the server is off and I want to power it on remotely, turn the smart plug off and then on which would power the pc on. Of course I’ll always do the proper shutdown procedure, I’m just unsure if idea could damage or wear out any of my components? I’m not sure if you’re supposed to switch off the psu before cutting wall power?

 

 Any feedback would be appreciated! 

When you add a SMART plug, it means one more failure point. In your case, the best solution was make WOL work for power on Unraid. Or simple use Switch robot to press the power-switch of the PC.

 

 

I use different kind SMART plug with home-assistance (HA) to keep track the power usage and monitoring the working state of different home appliances, about a week ago the Refrigerator plug crash, it switch-off but the reading still going, so this haven't trigger the abnormal alert ( push message to my mobile ). Finally I have add some rule in HA to overcome this case.

 

( If energy usage not change more then 1.5 hrs or power usage above 200w in 3sec then shutdown and alert me )

 

 

 

 

Edited March 31, 20242 yr by Vr2Io

7 hours ago, Connor19 said:

so it is safe for me to enable the setting in the bios that boots the pc after power loss and then when the server is off and I want to power it on remotely, turn the smart plug off and then on which would power the pc on.

Yeah, the BIOS setting will work for you, but that is not the real problem.

Once beeing ON, you need an automatic means to turn it off somehow.

It is unwise to allow the UNRAID gui beeing accessed from the internet, UNRAID is not prepared to fight all those nasty attacks you are instantly exposed to. Using the UNRAID-connect is a safer method. From here you can turn off (shutdown) the server.

But that is not all, you also need to switch off the plug later on to be able to repeat the complete procedure.

I use some shelly devices as a plug and you can set up some easy automation rules like "if plug is ON adn used-engery<10W then turn off plug". This can be done with the shelly cloud, by home automation, or even with your own skript like  I did some years ago already.

Once beein OFF the BIOS needs a grace period before it will monitor for power coming back on again. So wait for the next restart at least a minute, better wait five minutes.

 

I personally would not encourage to use this semi-manual feature. Too much harm can be done if you forget to shutdown before turning off and so on. I use it for the backup server only, plug switches to ON at a certain time, Server boots, Server starts Backup, Server shuts it down when finished and another server monitors the power usage und turns off the plug after it dropped below a certain value. Thats safe.

 

I should have stated that I do use unraid connect to shut the server down and connect to it remotely, and the smart plug I use is an eve energy plug which can also monitor the power usage, and because I have a home hub I can monitor the power usage and turn it off and on remotely, so the plan would be when the server is off and I want to turn it on, I can simply go to my eve app, turn the smart plug off and then on again which theoretically should boot the system

Edited March 31, 20242 yr by Connor19