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?
I’ve been mentally experimenting with an ESP32 hooked up to my desktop’s PWR header with a switch. I’ve done worse than that before, so I know it’ll work. I just haven’t gotten my ass around to it. I can send commands to it through my domain via Apache acting as a reverse proxy.
Hey I did exactly this a few years ago! Uses an optocoulper for isolation. I flashed ESPHome on it and connected it to my Home Assistant instance.
Works like a charm!
I also hard wired the ESP power pins to the PC via a spare USB header. Then I enabled a BIOS setting to keep USB ports powered when shut down, so it’s a super seamless install.
Only problem I’m having with it lately is since I run a dual boot system, my default GRUB option is Linux, but sometimes (unfortunately) I need to get into Windows. It’s a bit of a pain to have to update grub to change the default then restart again. I’d rather build in some sort of selection functionality the first time it boots.
I’ve been playing around with using another ESP32 as a filesystem USB device, then having grub read the content of a file on said ESP32, either “windows” or “linux”, then booting accordingly. That’s a work in progress tho
There are ready made modules for it that slot into an unused PCIe slot into your case. They are available on aliexpress, search for „tuya WiFi pc power switch)
That actually seams pretty awsome, just using a really low powered device to send WOL commands.