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Comment by illusive4080 | Hacker News Reader

I’m also cautiously optimistic about matter.

I have a server I’m sending to someone else’s house, and if it crashes, I want to use a smart plug to cycle it. I have a Eufy smart plug I got for free. Is there a better alternative? This persons house has no automation and no smart hub. Unfortunately I’ll either need something cloud based or something I can statically point to my own Home Assistant running in my house. Is this cloud based Eufy plug my best choice?

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You can do this with a $30 Sonoff S31 running ESPHome [0]. Since the Sonoff wall switch can run a ping sensor against your server you could create a watchdog automation right on the S31 to shut off the mains power to the S31 switch and turn back on after X seconds.

There are other ways you could have the S31 do operational checks but ultimately ESPHome is probably an interesting consideration and supported by tons of off the shelf hardware.

[0] https://esphome.io/

> This persons house has no automation and no smart hub.

There are devices with "watchdog" features that can cycle power automatically if an ICMP ping fails. https://shop.netio.eu/netio-power-sockets/powercable-2pz/

Also, people have rolled their own watchdog solutions using Sonoff devices flashed with Tasmota. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/watchdog-device-using-...

130€? That better guarantee some uptime. I can see why people are rolling their own.

I use PiKVM to give the NAS I have running at a friend's house for remote backups IPMI like accessibility. https://pikvm.org/

The TP Link Kasa plugs are well documented and have a dead simple TCP payload to turn them on/off. They also have the cloud option, but I don't see why you couldn't use a wireguard tunnel or something from their router if you wanted to avoid the cloud.

Not that I'd recommend it, but you could probably just port forward an obscure port directly to the Kasa plug (DHCP to a static IP).

I've used things like this SMS plug[0] before for places that I needed to power cycle to bring connection back.

[0] https://cpc.farnell.com/tekview/powertxtuk/gsm-power-socket-...

Given that you’re planning on operating it remotely, cloud based is just fine, as if their internet is down, and it’s local, there’s nothing you can do anyway.

Shelly plugS

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