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Unable to use LogMeIn - home computer must have frozen???

M

m021478

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 23, 2007
379
5
I do a lot of traveling away from my home, and when I do I rely on the amazing remote screen sharing service LogMeIn to allow me to control and access my home computer while I am away.

I have currently been away from home for nearly four months now, and on three different occasions, I've needed to ask a friend from back home to visit my house and force-restart my computer because I was no longer able to access it via LogMeIn because my home computer had frozen for one reason or another.

I need to find some sort of a fail-safe method for remotely force restarting home my computer when I am in a pinch, without the need for a friend to visit my house.

Does anyone know of something that can do this? I seem to recall hearing about a power strip (or something along those lines) that is connected to an Ethernet plug allowing WAN access, or that is perhaps linked to a web service which I could log-in to from anywhere in the world and from the site, I could issue the command to cut the power (thereby force-shutting down my home computer), and then issue the command to resume power (theoretically thereby causing my computer to restart...I think)??

There must be something out there that can accomplish what I am seeking to do... anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!
 
If you're computer is "frozen" there is no fail-safe solution other then physically rebooting the computer. I use vnc, logmein, gotomypc, RDP and apple's remote desktop. In every case there has been occasions that the guest machine has become unresponsive. The only solution was to have someone reboot the machine.
 
There is a force restart option hidden somewhere in the LogMeIn website (once you connect to a machine).

This works really well on Windows - not sure about Mac clients. But worth looking into.
 
revs said:
There is a force restart option hidden somewhere in the LogMeIn website (once you connect to a machine).
Click to expand...
provided the machine is in a state that it can take that command. That's the issue with remote access software. There are times when you need somebody to physically access the machine to resolve a problem. Some of the options like force restart certainly can mitigate the issue to some degree however.
 
I once had a colocated Linux server. Every now and then I had to go down to the colo site and pull the plug. I would have loved one of these gadgets but I'm afraid I would have been billed for using up another ip address. :eek: For a home user, you have to make sure that your router/firewall is set up to not only allow access to the machine running logmein (or vnc or whatever) but you need remote access to the tcpip power plug as well.
 
Logmein - remote reboot

you have several reboot options if you have a computer that can't be restarted from within the operating system but you do have logmein access.

Connect to the computer using logmein, select preferences/advanced/view reboot options. Select emergency reboot, hard reboot, safe-mode reboot, etc.
 
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