Reboot or power-off/on the mainboard remotely

Creators & Developers Mainboard
1

I’m using a 11th-gen mainboard in standalone as a server, and I’ve got the situation where it stopped responding but I was not at home to manually reboot it.

Does anybody has some ready-to-use solution for this case?

I know that for full-size PC cases there is the PokyPow project, but it would probably not work for the mainboard in a CoolerMaster case.

2

If the system is unresponsive, then you are out of luck. You’re talking about IPMI or something similar. That is a part of the system that is separate and is part of the enterprise world and not consumer electronics.

It is a pain when the server goes down, but I have to manually restart it. Thankfully, it doesn’t go down very often. I think mine has been running now for over a year. It hosts 3 VMs running various webservices.

1 Like
3

Thanks.
I’m wondering if tapping into the leads of the power button, soldering wires to them, could allow to use something like the PokyPow on it.

Actually, much more simply: as the only power source of the mainboard is the USB-C PD, it would suffice to have a device to disconnect or reconnect just that. That would be surprising if nobody has invented such device yet!

4

Hi,

There are two possible solutions

  1. go into the bios and set it to power on when a psu is connected. You can then use a remotely operated mains switch to power it on/off.

  2. use a EC CCD. This gives you serial port access to the EC chip on the mainboard. One can then give it commands to switch on/off the CPU.
    This is much like an IPMI on servers.

2 Likes
5

Thank you!!
I sent an email to D. Howett, as this looks promising indeed!!

6

all you would need is something you can remotely control that can hit a button or even just open a switch if youre willing to do a bit of soldering to bypass the mainboard switch, pokypow could probably actually work pretty well.

1 Like
7

Thanks, yes that would be a solution too!

By the way, my problem was bigger than a simple reboot anyway…
Somehow the eGPU and the ethernet card both stopped working on their respective USB ports, and I had to shift them both to their neighboring one…
I hope this doesn’t portend more hardware problems in the near future…

8

funky… iirc all of the 11th gen board’s ports are tb4