New to roon, I just finished installing a dedicated ubuntu server for roon.
This server is hidden in my office, without a keyboard or screen.
Everything works perfectly, however, when I leave for a few days, I would like to be able to simply shut down this server, currently, I connect via SSH and execute a shutdown in a terminal.
The Web UI is part of Roon OS (ROCK, Nucleus) and you can’t have this with RoonServer on Linux.
However, you can send complete commands to the ssh-server on a remote machine, instead of logging into the remote machine with ssh manually and then executing the command:
Shutting down a remote Ubuntu server is not a function of Roon so I would look at software solutions that are available for Ubuntu (regardless of whether you’re running Roon or not) as a possible alternative.
For example, loading something like the Webmin package on your server to monitor & control it with that. My guess is that the Rock-specific software is something similar to this generally available version.
There may be other tools that will do this task as well. Like creating a PowerShell script that does a remote login & issues a shutdown command. You could create a shutdown.ps1 script that runs when you double-click it:
# Install Posh-SSH if not already installed
# Install-Module -Name Posh-SSH -Scope CurrentUser
Any server management web-gui will do here.
Darryl’s suggestion for a powershell script is probably the easiest if you really only need to shutdown and don’t require other features.
Also, depending on your library size, Roon might take a few minutes to like 10 to ‘start’, you may re-consider shutting down the server if that’s an annoyance.
My computer is a mac mini M1, I can’t use powershell, but the solutions proposed above should allow me to shut down the server properly.
Too bad Roon doesn’t offer this interface to simply install it with Ubuntu.
Yes, for the sake of ecology, I will turn off this server when I travel or during the holidays, its consumption is 30w at rest, not negligible.
As @Eve_Fox mentioned, since the Mac OS is Unix-based, there are a couple of ways to do a PowerShell-like solution with something like a bash script. Using Google, it is easy to find a couple of different ways that people have tried to accomplish this task.
Some use the sshpass library to transmit credentials in script files without interactive prompting. Others generate SSH keys on the Mac then store them on the remote Ubuntu server to authenticate the user when a remote shutdown command is transmitted. I could probably write an Ubuntu script that would use something like netcat to listen to a port for a specific command like “Shutdown Roon!”. If that string was received on that particular port, then a shutdown script would be run. Your Mac could simply throw that string at the IP address & selected port of the Roon server to let it know it needed to shut itself down with no login or authentication required.
There’s probably several ways to accomplish this task.
Probably better to not have a dependency on the target server when the eventual command being run is literally just a shutdown command that doesn’t require any ‘logic’. The shutdown command should allow roon to cleanly exit no?
sshpass or something similar, or keys is best security wise, however we could probably give him the command to run on the server which would allow the shutdown command without sudo required (not hugely risky here, worst case scenario, your server shuts down).
A hardcoded username:pass in a script on your Mac isn’t the hugest problem if it’s just a user account on the Roon server, especially if that pass is unique to the server.
If you have any interest in monitoring the ‘state’ of your server and the load on it, it’s probably better to go through the small hassle of finding a web-ui that satisfies your needs, a decent one will give you insights on the performance / load, notify you of disk issues or storage utilization creep etc.
All that stuff isn’t always super easy to set up on your own so a project that bundles everything together is can be easier when someone is getting started. Furthermore, a ‘server’ if it’s really reliable, probably isn’t giving you problems for months or even years on end, you don’t actively ‘check’ on it, which can lead to things like ‘how the hell did all my storage fill up?’ or missing the obvious signs that a disk is failing.
I don’t have recommendations here, I use grafana + victoriametrics (until influx 3.0 is deployable on prem effectively).
Hello everyone,
I’m back with news about shutting down my ubunbtu 24.04 lts server.
The cockpit interface was always sending me a warning because it was being used in http and not https (no certificate) and was reachable via the same IP address as ROON, a bit confusing at times, and causing slow detection with roon clients.
Anyway, I removed cokpit, installed “ACPI” on the server and created a script with chatgpt to easily shut down the server just by pressing the ON/OFF button.
It works perfectly, very fast, sometimes I’d turn off my mac before turning off the server… I’d have to turn it back on, now I just press the server button to turn it on, then the same button to turn it off!
If this helps people with the same configuration as me, I’d be delighted.
If nobody else with a mac in front of them chimes in, I’ll type you out a script to use.