GNet Solutions

The VPS Infrastructure has recently encountered a power outage, and having no UPS backup led to an immediate outage of all web services. Only two machines were online when I arrived at the server space, the router (which is good) and a new unconfigured VPS node. Unfortunately the primary server that receives SSH traffic is web1, a PowerPC server. I found that PowerPC machines have the ability to turn back on when the Power Management Unit is set in the right way. The tool needed is in the powerpc-utils package:

sudo apt-get install powerpc-utils

Automatic boot enabled (Server Mode)

The command to set automatically power on after power loss, run:

autoboot -v on

Boot script to automatically set autoboot¶

• Create boot script:
  

  vi /etc/init.d/autoboot
  

• Add:
  

  #! /bin/sh
  #
  PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
  set -e
  case "$1" in
    start|restart|force-reload|reload)
          echo -n "Autoboot..." 
          /sbin/autoboot -v on
          echo
          ;;
    stop)
          exit 0
          ;;
    *)
          N=/etc/init.d/autoboot
          echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload}" >&2
          exit 1
          ;;
  esac
  exit 0
  

• Make the script bootable
  

  chmod +x /etc/init.d/autoboot
  

• And the symbolic link in /etc/rcS.d:
  

  ln -s /etc/init.d/autoboot /etc/rcS.d/S60autoboot
  

Resources¶

• https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2006/11/msg00214.html