Comment on My homelab had the stupidest outage ever
Khanzarate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The only real solution is to make this an extended maintenance task. The batteries are cheap so an alert every 4 years is likely sufficient to replace the battery before it dies. You could do it every 2 or 3 years instead at your discretion.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
This is the correct answer. No matter how reliable your power feed is you still need to reboot the server at some point for whatever reason and if CMOS battery is dead by then you’ll have the very same issue and you’ll need monitor and keyboard again. And even if you don’t mind about the RTC on board you’ll still lose the settings.
I wonder why manufacturers haven’t switched over to supercapacitors or something else than a coin cell battery, but perhaps there’s a valid reason for it. I think that supercaps can’t hold charge as long as a coin cell, but if your board is completely cold for a year or so maybe losing bios settings isn’t that big of a deal.
Khanzarate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Well they still have a finite life and are less replaceable than a battery. Even if it quadrupled the lifespan (which is a reasonably generous estimate given OP’s 4-year duration and wikipedia telling me supercapacitors last 10-15 years), it would still eventually need to be replaced and that would generally require resoldering it.
I think a much better solution is 2 battery slots, one to be a backup battery, unused, and then when needed, an LED on the mobo can be turned on. Honestly OP could jury-rig up a similar system if he wanted to, although it’d be a bit ugly and anytime something is jury-rigged I don’t really think of it as reliable.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
You could of course use some kind of socket or connetor for supercap, but as they last far less than I thought then I get why it doesn’t make sense. This thinkstation I’m writing with in my garage I got for free at old office is from 2011 and it’s still running original cmos battery. No idea if there’s any juice left on it, but at least it doesn’t complain anything at boot and once it refuses to boot it’ll become e-waste immediately (I do metal working, fix cars etc at the garage, so internals of this thing are far from clean, I think this is 3rd or 4th hardware for 10 years in here with only the SSD moved from setup to another).