Gadgetory

we all know the computer basics you want to turn your computer on you press this button on the front you want to see what the computer is doing you look at the monitor you want to reset the computer if it crashes you press this other button on the front but do you know how to do all of those things if you're a thousand miles away oh I know I know okay well good for you smartypants here's a gold star for everyone else stay tuned donal bear is the easy-to-use VPN service that lets you use the web as though you're in one of twenty different countries learn more and try total bear for free at the link in the video description so there are a huge number of reasons that you might want to be able to access or control your computer from far away it ranges from totally mainstream stuff like needing to grab a file off your desktop for the homework assignment you were planning to print at school before handing it in which yeah whatever I think you still understood my point to enthusiasts stuff like realizing you want to share all those birthday pictures you took of little Joseph while you're visiting it Josephine and your FTP is down to IT administrator stuff like realizing that someone put windows on one of your servers and you need to throttle everyone else in the building's internet connection so not a moment is wasted while you download your favorite Linux distro now to this virtual media install it and restore order to the universe so let's start with more basic solutions and work our way up to the cooler but regrettably more expensive ones the first one shouldn't cost a dime because if you already bought a decent PC in the last 10 years there's a very good chance that it has a feature called wake-on-lan so the way wake-on-lan works is as long as the computer is plugged into wall power even if it's in a shutdown state it actually consumes a little bit of electricity illuminating power indicator LEDs on your motherboard or power supplied even enabling functionality like charging plugged in phones or tablets over special USB ports and you guessed it keeping your network card juiced up enough that it can wait for what's called a magic packet and bring the whole computer to life wake on land can be configured a handful of ways you can set it up in the UEFI or the bios of your motherboard or you can actually do it from within the network card configuration panel in most modern operating systems you can even specify if you want a magic packet to only work in sleep versus when the machine is fully powered down wake-on-lan has though it requires either a separate machine that you can remote into using something like TeamViewer to use a utility to send a magic packet or a VPN or some firewall and routing rules to be configured for it to work from outside of the local network on top of that wake-on-lan is not capable of shutting down the computer that needs to be done through your operating system so wake-on-lan does nothing to help you if the system hangs and is stuck in an unresponsive state or fails to boot for one reason or another which leads us then into some jenkki solutions to this problem covering a bit of a range in terms of difficulty and expense first up is a solution I actually really like this is a Belkin Wemo you may remember it from the channel super fun prank where berkland I made the LMG staff believe they had triggered the building alarm you want to check that out here this one is relatively cheap and I already had it lying around but any smart home power socket that can be remotely switched on and off with an app will work for this so these things are intended for something like a bedside lamp but by configuring the computer to turn the machine on after AC power loss and every non laptop that I've encountered has this option buried somewhere within the BIOS you can do a hard shut down using the Wemo by just cutting power to it and then turn it back on if for whatever reason it fails to boot and the machine should try to boot again well what if I don't want to spend $50 on a clever wall socket good question the way a PC powers on and off is simply by bridging two contacts on the motherboard power switch allowing electricity to flow so it's a short press to power on and to safe power off and a long press for about five seconds for a hard forced shutdown so get creative here's a great thread on the Raspberry Pi forums that covers some of the ways folks have used Arduino and raspberry PI's to wire up the power on and off switches for their remote pcs and actually Luke even told me once about a solution that he created for someone who didn't want to spend a dime or any time but who happened to have a spare a laptop with an external five and a quarter inch optical drive where he put the optical drive next to the server's power switch so he could remote into the laptop and eject the disk tray causing it to bump the power switch not an ideal solution but definitely creative and the sky is pretty much the limit here but none of that stuff allows for the computer to be fully managed in the same way that you could if you were sitting in front of it and that is where ipmi comes in this Super Micro motherboard actually a super sexy soon-to-be-released micro ATX model the support for up to 22 core processors four sticks of quad channel memory and dual onboard 10 gigabit network cards the x10 SRM TF comes with a dedicated additional network port that is just for ipmi or intelligent platform management interface you assign it a static IP within the BIOS then you can use any computer on the same network to navigate to that IP login and assuming you've got your job up to date and your security settings all configured you'll be looking at a whole wealth of freaking cool tools and functionalities you can see the system hardware you can monitor server health to see if your CPU is running cool enough and if it's not you can check if your fans are still spinning or you can set up a different fan curve you can do event logs you can mount virtual disks and drives you can of course power on or off the computer in any way you please and you can even do advanced things like updating the BIOS or the IPMI firmware and adjusting BIOS settings using the real-time view of the VGA output that's on the back of the board the problem is that SiC features like a real-time view of exactly what the machine is outputting often require special Hardware aside from just that network port to be built into the motherboard and while motherboards with add-on ipmi modules a soos has a number of them available do exist they mostly come with IP mi or without it there are K VMs that are remotely knowledgeable but they are much more expensive than investing in IPMI capable Hardware in the first place and they won't support everything that an IP my board can do now to be clear IPM is not perfect and poses some serious security risks I mean remember when someone has physical access to your machine it's not your machine anymore but it's the king when it comes to remote management and it saved me quite a few late-night trips to the office crunchyroll as the site created by anime fans for anime fans they offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan and they have a huge collection of the most popular anime series the featured content for spring of this year is twin star exorcists Ace Attorney read 0 and kid neighbor of course they've got like way more than that and all the content on their site is professionally subtitled so all you've got to do is head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus which is linked in the video description to sign up for a free 30-day trial of crunchyroll premium 30 days our link gives you a whole month a free anime completely ad free and if you enjoy the many benefits of premium like 1080p streaming getting new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere with subtitles and being able to stream anywhere anytime to a variety of devices like your phone tablet or game console you can continue your premium membership to crunchyroll for only 7 bucks a month so head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and check them out so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions up there buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum which by the way you can go to its linked in the video description asked your questions and all that kind of stuff now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what should I watch next maybe check out this video over on channel super fun our tertiary Channel click the little eye up there and go check it out it at guarantee it'll be fun maybe even super fun you