Lenovo Ideacentre - how to start on power application?

[Bo Berglund]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2024 17:15:23 +0100, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:

Lots of password talk here....
I think I probably used my "standard" login to this computer but since it is
Windows one cannot know. All of my Linux devices use the same login except the
server.

Might be that the Windows part is one of two possibilities.

>>
>> Is there some setting that can be made on this machine that tells it to start if
>> power has been cycled? I.e. when power unexpectedly disappears and then returns
>> again it should start up normally.
>
>Another possibility, if you have another machine on the network that
>*does* start up (a Pi for example), is to use Wake On Lan. Install
>etherwake on the pi, then you can use wakeonlan sent every 10 minutes,
>or whatever, to start the server up.
>

So I have *lots* of machines on my home network, especially Raspberries (10+ of
them) and my old laptops converted to Linux machines for various use.

The main problem is access to the network if the server we are discussing here
stops running, since it is handling the OpenVPN connection into the LAN so with
that out of commission I am locked out unless I am at home, in which case I can
physically push the start button...

So I have built an RPi4B device now as an OpenVPN server to serve as a backdoor
into the LAN besides the normal OpenVPN server. I did that at the company office
as well and it has actually been in use in a few cases. For example when running
the release-upgrade on the server.

That being said, if I have that Lenovo server computer not starting how can it
be started via the LAN without first going into the BIOS (and hence into Windows
first)? AFAICT you have to enable wakeonlan in the BIOS, right?

Apparently I am able to install etherwake 1.09-4+b1 ot the RPi4 (which is
running Bookworm).

Can one send wake commands to a *running* device without ill effects?

Note that the server is running Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS, which has been incrementally
upgraded from 16 -> 18 -> 20.

When I did a release upgrde on another server (which was a virtual machine
running in VMWare ESX) I got into networking problems when the upgrade changed
the network handler, so that is why I am still on this version.

I don't want to do it on a non-virtual machine since I cannot set a "point" to
return to if the upgrade goes bad.



-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden