My OMV server died, and you won't believe what happened next.

  • Sorry for the clickbait-inspired title. I couldn't resist. :D


    Last night, a storm passed through my area and resulted in a power outage. It was not one of those outages where the power stays out for a while and comes back on, but rather, it was the kind of outage where the power was randomly going on and off. I have my OMV server set up so that after a power failure occurs, it boots up automatically when power is restored. In this past, this has always worked just fine, but last night, things played out differently. This morning, I woke up to find that my OMV server was off. It appeared that it had not recovered from the power failure. I pressed the power button, but nothing happened. The computer was lifeless. If the machine was not plugged in to a surge protector, I would have suspected that a surge trashed the machine, but since the machine is surge protected, I refused to accept that as the reason for the failure. Long story short, I got the machine working again after several hours of troubleshooting by pulling the CMOS battery and booting without it before putting it back. After taking the machine apart, putting it back together, and doing it all over twice because I installed the CMOS battery backwards, I was able to get the server fully functioning again. (It's an old Asus VivoPC, so even getting to the CMOS battery is a time-consuming task, and the fact that it's not meant to be taken apart makes it even harder to get to because you cannot completely remove the top without ripping some wires out.)


    Now, the story obviously has a happy ending, but there's a reason for me sharing it beyond just wanting to tell a story. Specifically, I would like to ask about how I can prevent something like this from happening in the future. I need the machine to boot automatically after power is restored so that if a power outage occurs when I am not home, I will still be able to get to my stuff after power is restored. Is there any alternative solution for my requirements that I could put in place to prevent this from being an issue? In this case, I was home and I didn't really need the server at that moment, so it was not a big deal, but if I am on the road and I want to get to something on it, I really can't just do the CMOS battery trick. Does anyone have any suggestions?

  • Only a good and large UPS could help in such situations. Since we ran in a couple of problems with UPS the last 2 decades our default policy today is to use servers with dual PSUs, connect one to the UPS and the other to mains (and this in a city where we almost never have outages).

    I was afraid of that. I was really hoping that I would be able to get around needing a UPS.

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