Re: [school-discuss] powering on K12LTSP network after power glitch

[No One <no-one@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 15:50 -0500, Daniel Howard wrote:
> One of the interesting issues we're seeing as we deploy 3-5 clients and 
> one server to each classroom is that the electrical power in our school 
> apparently glitches more often that we suspected, and inevitably the 
> clients try to boot before the server has fully rebooted, and the 
> clients end up booting from their hard disk in that awful proprietary 
> mode.  While we're going to focus on showing the teachers how to reboot 
> their classroom K12LTSP networks, I was wondering whether it would be 
> possible to have a script at the end of the server boot sequence that 
> sends a reboot command to all clients.  I think most computers can be 
> set in the BIOS now to autopower on when power is detected, so that fix 
> plus the addition of the aforementioned script would make it so the 
> system always comes up w/o requiring teachers to manually reboot anything.

Try using Wake on LAN. Set the computers to not come back on after a
power failure and enable the Wake on LAN support. I use that to turn on
all the computers so I can push updates or reinstall them.  You need to
know the MAC address for each computer for that to work.

Wake on LAN mini HOWTO
http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/jpo/software/wakeonlan/mini-howto/

That includes links to software, though I recommending using Net::Wake
(Perl) and write one yourself.

You could have it set up so that when the server is back up it could
then turn on all the computers.

You could also buy some UPS's as they're pretty cheap now.  Since
they're just thin clients they're probably not using much power.  You
should be able to run several computers off on one.

If you wanted to you could have a UPS on the server, then set the
computers to turn on after a power failure.  That could also work since
the server wouldn't go down.