Booting Multiple Boards in series?

[nixscripter]

I have a multi-machine cluster, and I am building a custom housing for it. What I would really like is to include a custom switch, and press once to boot them all. All of the motherboards are ATX.

Three questions, which I hope are simple:

1. Can I just wire up the power pins in series, i.e. switch to hot to cold to hot to cold to switch?
2. Are there other risks of having the ground pins of the power switches interconnected? I would add that the PSUs of all machines will be grounded to the same circuit.
3. Should the power switch be momentary or latching? Based on computers I have used I would guess momentary, but I can't be sure, and Wikipedia doesn't say.

 

[{PMS}fishy]

Do the MBs support wake on LAN? You could just have the head node "wake" its compute nodes in any order you would like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

 

[nixscripter]

Thanks for the tip. I will look into it. But I have heard that some motherboard manufacturers support it better than others, and this hardware isn't the newest.

In the mean time, any answers to my prior questions?

 

[{PMS}fishy]

In the mean time, any answers to my prior questions?

Wire all the power headers to one momentary switch.

 

[nixscripter]

So that would be parallel, not series. Reading the standard, I guess I see that: one is +5V the other is just ground.

Thanks.