I’m still awaiting Vera, and I just experienced one huge drawback of running home automation software on a PC.
We just had a short (an hour or so) power outage. When power was back, guess what - internet, voip - all reconnected - but PC remained down until I came to push the button. So as long as I’m not at home there’s no way to restore automatic HA control… oh boy… Yeah, I could do LAN wakeup but it’s hard to setup and unreliable in many cases.
Anything on embedded Linux would simply restart, which is IMHO one huge advantage. Where are those marketing guys?..
Check your BIOS settings. There’s usually a “Recover from AC loss” or similar option that let’s you select an option to turn on the machine automatically.
You’re right, the PC won’t recognize it as a power loss if the UPS shuts it down. It just thinks it was shut down normally. You would have to unplug the UPS to utilize the auto restart on power loss feature and I don’t think it’s worth it. But I do think the option for that is in the power settings of the bios. I thought the wake on lan was for bringing the sustem out of standby or hibernate. I didn’t think wake on lan actually turned a unit on.
Bios settings should be available for most systems that are no more than 4-5 years old. It will allow any loss of power besides a shutdown command to have the system start up automaticly.
For my system critical machine at home, I also setup a schedule to turn it on every hour. If it’s already on… nothing happens.
Majority of ATX compliant mobos have this option (recover from AC loss) one way or another, so it is not limited to 4-5 years old ones.
WOL (Wake on LAN) once properly configured, can power up PC from its off state, not just standby or hibernate. LAN NIC needs to support this feature though.
On Linux it is configured with:
ethtool -s eth0 wol g
Where options are:
wol p|u|m|b|a|g|s|d…
Sets Wake-on-LAN options. Not all devices support this. The argument to this option is a string of characters specifying which options to enable.
p Wake on phy activity
u Wake on unicast messages
m Wake on multicast messages
b Wake on broadcast messages
a Wake on ARP
g Wake on MagicPacket™
s Enable SecureOn™ password for MagicPacket™
d Disable (wake on nothing). This option clears all previous options.
One of the tools to send a MagicPacket, is etherwake
As I mentioned in my initial post of the device on the Z-Wave Forum one very cool feature with the device is it can send a text or e-mail when there’s been power loss.
