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Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

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Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

#1

Post by darwindarak »

Hi HN,

I’ve wanted a simple solution to handle Wake-on-LAN sequences for my home and work labs to boot up servers in the right order. I was already dabbling in Rust and thought this would be an interesting project to dive deeper and see if it could work well for this kind of network tool. The result is rallyup.

rallyup lets you set up server dependencies in a YAML file, so each service (e.g., firewalls, storage, VM hosts) comes online in the right order. It verifies each server’s status before moving to the next.

Features:

- Dependency-based WOL with VLAN support - Built-in health checks (HTTP, open ports, shell commands) - Lightweight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi or similar device

Would love any feedback. Thanks for taking a look!

Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler
github.com

Re: Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

#4

Post by sgarland »

nubinetwork wrote: post #3

Is wake on LAN any good these days? I remember it being flaky in the late 90s early 00s...

I haven't had problems with it the past few years, on SuperMicros.

EDIT: as the sibling comment reminded me, I'm using IPMI, not WoL. That said, I have tested WoL and had no issues with it doing its job – I only switched because I had a server that would randomly fail to find its NVMe drive at boot; rebooting (which IPMI allowed me to do) would fix it.

Re: Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

#5

Post by _joel »

nubinetwork wrote: post #3

Is wake on LAN any good these days? I remember it being flaky in the late 90s early 00s...

Been fine for me mid 00's and onwards. From memory with SuperMicro, HP, Dell kit etc. Ususally setup via ipmi. Not done it for a while, but don't recall issues.

Re: Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

#6

Post by sgarland »

One thing that might be useful is to allow a given server in the chain to fail. For example, if you had a Proxmox (or other hypervisor) cluster, in the event that a single node fails to come up, you'd probably want everything else to still boot. Or maybe it would be easier if there was a separate category for VM vs. hypervisor?

Either way, neat project, and thank you for sharing.

Re: Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

#7

Post by SushiHippie »

nubinetwork wrote: post #3

Is wake on LAN any good these days? I remember it being flaky in the late 90s early 00s...

I only had one problem with it, and that was that it isn't enough to enable it in the BIOS, but I needed to flip a switch on Windows and set up a systemd service on Linux (I dual boot).

For Linux set it to "g": https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wake-on-LAN#Make_it_persist...

For Windows you need to enable "Wake on Magic Packet": https://www.windowscentral.com/how-enable-and-use-wake-lan-w...

Re: Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

#9

Post by darwindarak »

sgarland wrote: post #6

One thing that might be useful is to allow a given server in the chain to fail. For example, if you had a Proxmox (or other hypervisor) cluster, in the event that a single node fails to come up, you'd probably want everything else to still boot. Or maybe it would be easier if there was a separate category for VM vs. hypervisor? Either way, neat project, and thank you for sharing.

Thanks for the feedback! So would a tagging system be useful? Right now you can declare dependencies on a single server, but maybe we can have it depend on at least one of the machines in a tagged group booting up?

Re: Show HN: rallyup – Lightweight Wake-on-LAN Scheduler

#10

Post by angrygoat »

nubinetwork wrote: post #3

Is wake on LAN any good these days? I remember it being flaky in the late 90s early 00s...

It's pretty heavily used in some on premises HPC contexts... used to run a large supermicro cluster which we would power down when not needed, which saved a fair amount of electricity (and by extension emissions and money.) It's quite solid.
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