Whack-On-Lan

[Christopher Rutter]

All this talk of Wake-On-Lan has brought up a longtime question I've had
about remote reset via lan (a.k.a. Whack-On-Lan).  The issue is I am the
administrator for an Ubuntu server that is 1,098 miles away (via car Boston
<-> Atlanta, GA) and is locked in a closet.  On the VERY rare occation when
the server crashes and I can't SSH into it I have to call the owner of the
company and have him drop what he's doing and phsyically go down to the
office unlock the closet and reset the server (he's the only one with keys,
and I'd like to keep it that way).  So you can see how this can become a
nuisance, so I rarly update the box when one of us is not on-site (sometimes
the system hangs on reboot after an update, but that's a whole nother
issue).

I've researched this in the past and the only solution I've been able to
find is a DRAFT paper written in Dec 2005 by the School of Computing at the
University of Utah: *http://*www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/whol-ftn-draft1.pdf

While I am fairly handy with a soldering iron, but I don't feel comfortable
using this homebrew solution for production use.
So I am curious to hear what other BLU members are using to remotly reset
machines via ethernet.  Does a consumer grade or cheap enterprise solution
exist?
Do you think I should just suck it up and build one of these homebrew
Whack-On-Lan switches?

Thanks in advance for any/all comments & suggestions,
-Chris