Remotely (re)starting my system via a smart power switch?

[Bo Berglund]

I have two HP Elitebook workstations (8440w and 8560w laptops) about 10 years
old.
They are used as Linux machines with Ubuntu Mate 20 and mainly work on
unattended video load and processing.

>From time to time these machines shut down, I believe from overheating, which is
cuurrently an issue due to the hot weather here in combination with the video
processing load....

During summer I am not able to do what I do when at home to fix the stops since
I live in my summer home 100 km away. But my home and local LAN:s are connected
together by VPN so I can work both ways with network access.

When one of these laptops shut down I typically just open the lid a bit and
press the power button and then close the lid and place it back. And it starts
up again.
Cannot be done now of course.

Now I would like to do what I have done for the other direction namely to use a
Shelly Plug S power switch to cycle power on the two laptops.

At the summer home I have an HP DESKPRO Mini G4 also running Ubuntu Mate and it
has no batteries, so I can power cycle it using the Shelly Plug S device.
This PC has the new type of UEFI BIOS so there was a struggle getting it to
actually start up when power is applied.

And I just realized that since the laptops have batteries they will not see a
power cycle at all....

Can I simply just remove the batteries on the laptops and then hook in the
remote switch in series with the power supply feed?

And do I need to configure something in Ubuntu Mate or BIOS to make them start
as soon as power is applied? If so, what can that be?
These laptops use the old style BIOS, not UEFI.


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden