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Hit the power button (jumper) on another PC ?

Former Member

So, I'm a bad sysadmin and I have to physically hit the power button on my servers every now and then.  The problem is my machines are in a server room that I can't always get to.

 

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this.  image

 

 

So, I think it would be cool to have another machine on the rack that can hit the power button on one or more of the PC's on the rack.

 

My first thought is to stick a Raspberry Pi on the rack and plug the PC's pwr and rst jumper leads into a relay board like this: http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-8-Channel-Relay-Module-Arduino/dp/B0057OC5WK/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367855066&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=8+channel+relaay+board

 

I would need a relay board, right?  Would the Raspberry Pi's output leads work on a jumper?

 

Would there be grounding issues?  I can plug the Raspberry Pi's power supply into the same outlet as my server, but it won't have a third 'ground' prong.  If there are grounding issues, would using the relay board solve them?

 

What's the simplest way to set this up?  Is there a board that has good library support or easy connectivity with the Raspberry Pi?

 

Has someone already done this or something similar?

 

Am I an idiot?

 

Thanks!  Any info is helpful!

 

 

 

An aside -- the normal solution to this would be a remotely controlled power strip.  Unfortunately, my motherboard doesn't always boot on power, despite having that attribute set in BIOS.  For example, if you do a shutdown, the motherboard won't boot the system on a power cycle.  890fxa-gd70, if anyone's interested. Wake on Lan only seems to work from 'suspended,' not shut down.  Also gonna look at an ethernet NIC WOL, but I don't expect that to work.

  • I know this topic is really old, but I just happened to come across it searching for something completely different, and just having done something similar at home, I thought i should at least comment.

     

    Firstly, I'm no ee expert and maybe my machine will fry eventually, but this worked and was extremity cheap. I wanted to keep my desktop machine powered down but have the ability to power it on remotely in case i needed something from it. Since I have an rpi sitting next to my desktop, accessible from the Internet, always powered on, I figured I could do something similar to what you mention.

     

    I basically wired an npn transistor in parallel between the pc case power switch and motherboard (using the collector and emitter pins) and use a gpio on the rpi to bring the base pin (on the npn) high when I need to simulate pressing the power button. (With a resistor between the rpi and base pin)

     

    This was like literally less than $2 in parts and has worked perfectly for me over the last several months. I also thought about wol, but this is better in the cases where the machine is hard locked. (Leave the pin high for 4 seconds, and you hard cycle it) I think I got the circuit from an arduino example for controlling a relay.. It's very simple.