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Comment by skocznymroczny | Hacker News Reader

At my workplace we had a farm of laptop machines and we weren't allowed to disassemble them to pull any power wires out. What we ended up using was a remotely controlled motor with a small plastic "finger" attached that would press on the power button for n seconds, depress, wait few seconds, then press it for n seconds again to do remote hard reboots.

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Had a secure server room with a maglock with very few cardholders and forgot our cards a few times. We wired-up a CD-ROM drive to a server positioned so that it pressed the door unlock button on the wall when it was ejected, so someone could ssh in to the server and "eject /dev/sr0" to get in.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/ITAPPMONROBOT

You're kidding me.

It's exactly the role of this robot in Wall-E: https://old.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/h7r2f2/when_w...

https://us.switch-bot.com/pages/switchbot-bot

$30 each?!

Found a similar rig set up years ago. The old Tektronix TDS scopes used to lock up in a go/no go test rig and stop responding to GPIB commands. Someone unknown got fed up of it so they wired a relay in a box up as an inline switch for the scope power and drove it from a spare port in a GPIB switch box that the test script talked to. This turned the scope on and off again before each test cycle so it was less likely to crash. This saved hours and hours of failed test runs.

That is awesome and I'm glad somebody did it. But was there some reason not to just pull the laptop batteries and use normal remote-controllable outlets?

> was there some reason not to just pull the laptop batteries and use normal remote-controllable outlets?

What happens when someone accidentally does a clean shutdown from within the OS?

Switchable PDUs have the same issue. You need something like Wake-on-LAN in addition to the switchable power to ensure you don't need to do a late night drive into the data center or office.

BIOS> plug-in behavior> turn on.

This is on by default on all server boards and the toggle was on all consumer boards i've tried.

Recent laptops do not work as well, or at all, with batteries not present.

Do you, by any chance, work for Intel in Gdańsk testing iGPUs for Apple laptops? I heard that story.

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