Whack-On-Lan

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Wed, 22 Apr 2009, Christopher Rutter wrote:

> All this talk of Wake-On-Lan has brought up a longtime question I've had
> about remote reset via lan (a.k.a. Whack-On-Lan).  The issue is I am the
> administrator for an Ubuntu server that is 1,098 miles away (via car Boston
> <-> Atlanta, GA) and is locked in a closet.  On the VERY rare occation when
> the server crashes and I can't SSH into it I have to call the owner of the
> company and have him drop what he's doing and phsyically go down to the
> office unlock the closet and reset the server (he's the only one with keys,
> and I'd like to keep it that way).  So you can see how this can become a
> nuisance, so I rarly update the box when one of us is not on-site (sometimes
> the system hangs on reboot after an update, but that's a whole nother
> issue).
>
> I've researched this in the past and the only solution I've been able to
> find is a DRAFT paper written in Dec 2005 by the School of Computing at the
> University of Utah: *http://*www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/whol-ftn-draft1.pdf
>
> While I am fairly handy with a soldering iron, but I don't feel comfortable
> using this homebrew solution for production use.
> So I am curious to hear what other BLU members are using to remotly reset
> machines via ethernet.  Does a consumer grade or cheap enterprise solution
> exist?
> Do you think I should just suck it up and build one of these homebrew
> Whack-On-Lan switches?

Please give it a try. Aside from the cost saving, the Whack-on-lan seems 
to be the only solution that doesn't require additional cables. I don't 
know about you, but it is difficult enough keeping the computer room neat, 
with the burden of 1 (LOM) or 4 (remote KVM) additional cables per server.

Something like this used to be available commericially as "reboot-on-lan" 
but seems to have disappeared.

Daniel Feenberg

>
> Thanks in advance for any/all comments & suggestions,
> -Chris
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