Sometimes I am amazed afterward by previous statements... In itself, the situation has not changed significantly since the previous blog, and at the same time, everything is different. My home server is still running under Ubuntu 20.04, but that has taken a lot of effort.

What is going on? I don't know the real answer (yet), although I'm starting to fear for the motherboard or the power supply of the server. In the worst case, both at the same time. Since the changes I described in the previous blog, my server won't wake up after being put into a sleep state with rtcwake. I have critically checked all settings in the BIOS, but there is nothing wrong with that. It is striking that I have had problems since the removal of the monitor and keyboard from the server, but I do not see any connection between that and the rtcwake-failure. In the past, the server also ran "headless". What happens now is that the motherboard turns on at exactly the right time, but at the same time, it gets stuck in the boot procedure, even before trying to connect to the display. Only the HDD LED lights up (solid) and nothing else happens. This may indicate that the server is having a hard time initializing the SATA subsystem. I can then only continue by turning the system off and on again, but only after letting it hang for a few minutes. If I immediately turn the server off and on again, it hangs again, as if the motherboard had to warm up a bit first...

I've really tried all sorts of solutions. At first, I thought it was due to Ubuntu. Searched for another OS and after intense Googling ended up with Openmediavault (OMV). And I have to say, that's a great solution. Only... it didn't solve my rtcwake problem, but it is a very nice system. It runs on Debian, so familiar territory for an Ubuntu user. But I can't manage to install it over a self-installed version of Debian, so I had to let the full OMV installation run its course. And he wants an HDD for himself. So the server SSD was used, of which only 1% was used from then on. I could have solved that eventually with GParted, but it didn't come to that. While I was playing, one of the HDDs of my ZFS-RAID failed. "Kadoeng! Kadoeng! Kadoeng!" and similar noises came from the server. Goodbye! That means spending money. I was able to access the ZFS pool in a "degraded" state for the time being, but that's only an emergency solution. The next failure will mean losing everything! I spent € 125,=. Removed the broken WD-Red 6 TB SATA drive and installed a Toshiba P300 6 TB. That in itself worked well. Simultaneously replaced OMV with Ubuntu 20.04. As good as OMV is, it didn't solve my rtcwake problem and it's not a panel app. So you cannot define virtual web servers with it. Then back to Ubuntu with Virtualmin and give the ZFS pool a "resilver" command. It took about 40 hours to get my RAID fully online again, but it worked. Hip hay!

Now some rest on the server front, although I hate having the server running all the time. Let's see if he wants to go into (and especially: out!) the standby mode via rtcwake.