So I want to setup a remote backup location at my parents house although they are very mindful about there electricity usage and environmental impact (and so am I) so I don’t want to have to have a pc always on when it doesn’t need to be.
Is it possible to setup remote Wake-on-lan so I can schedule my homelab at my place to wake up the server at my parents house and start a backup like once a week, I want to do this in a secure fashion as well so ideally no port forwarding, I currently use cloudflare tunnels for my home network.
Are there any other options or do you have a similar setup at your place?
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Similar to others, I do this but the reverse direction. I have a Pi with HDD at a friend’s house. On a timer, it wakes up at 3am, boots to a VPN and initiates an rsync (pull) with it’s twin Pi at my place. When the sync is done, it powers down or the timer cuts power at 9am.
Other than clock drift due to power outages, I’ve had no issues.
I have a directory that i can put scripts into and the remote Pi will execute anything in this directory after the sync and before the shutdown. Logs from the rsync or scripts are pushed back to a different directory on the local Pi.
I do backups with a Raspberry Pi with a 1TB SD card and leave it on all the time. The power draw is very small and I think reasonable for the value of offsite backups.
My personal experience with WOL (or anything related to power state of computers) is that it’s not reliable enough for something offsite. If you can set something up that’s stable, awesome, but if your backup server is down and you need to travel to it, that suuuucks.
I already have 2x2tb hard drives, a singular sd card is not enough for me I need some level of redundancy even for my backups.
Just ask Ian to start your computer when he goes on it
Lan is not the name of my parent 💀
Booting on a schedule as others have suggested would be the simplest by far.
To answer as asked though, it’s not something I’ve needed to do but it sounds like a VPN + IGMP proxy (I’m assuming you have a separate subnet for your VPN) might fit the bill.
Alternatively some kind of low power device (a Pi or something) that lives in the same subnet could make the WOL call locally, and you just need to find a way to trigger it. Could do it via a http call for example.
you can configure bios for self power on at certain time and then turn the server off after finishing backup
Second that. I don’t have another node that I can use for WoL at my backup location so I opted for the node to turn on every morning, run the backup and turn off using cron at a given time. Works perfectly!
I have a Raspberry Pi with a Wireguard VPN on it. So on my android phone, I connect to the Wireguard VPN, and then I use this app to trigger the WakeOnLan:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitklog.wolon
it ain’t pretty, and may not quite suit what you’re looking for. other comments recommending a pi or similar are likely better taste. but here’s what I’ve done:
I have a cheap Android tablet that stays home and is connected to our home network. if needed, I connect to the tablet with TeamViewer and use a WoL app to send the packet to my computer on that same network.
For a reliable and useful remote control solution, you’re looking for an IPKVM with ATX power control. To setup the power control, you effectively set up a parallel circuit where your power switch connects to the motherboard, letting the KVM effectively press the power button ‘normally’. As a bonus, you can connect to the video and data of the KVM for even more remote control options, like be able to troubleshoot boot issues or load a virtual CD/DVD to upgrade the OS.
For tinkerers, I recommend the PiKVM, either DIY or Preassembled. It’s important to know that a RaspberryPi is energy efficient compared to an x86. This guy crunched the numbers
If you’re looking for a product instead of a project, I’d recommend JetKVM.
That is a lot of money for me, especially if all I need it to do is simulate the on button. Surely there is some really cheap arm based device that has an ethernet port and can therefore send WOL signals.
I’m not sure what to tell ya. A cheap ARM device is the CanaKit 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 starter kit costs $110, but the JetKVM I recommended above including the ATX adapter is also $110
https://www.amazon.com/CanaKit-Raspberry-4GB-Starter-Kit/dp/B07V2B4W63/
https://www.wisdpi.com/products/jetkvm
https://www.wisdpi.com/products/atx-extension-board
The only setup I can imagine that’s technically cheaper is an esp32 flashed with firmware, as discussed by another user (you already replied to it): https://lemmy.world/comment/20842145
But the esp32 (regardless of if you use a wire to simulate a button press, or have the device generate the WoL packet) is gonna be a pain to setup and flash by comparison to the other options.
If you already have a pi, it just needs to be flashed with Raspbian and install the app etherwake ‘sudo apt-get install etherwake’ and run it with ‘sudo etherwake [target MAC]’.
