former power status

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi all,

I went down this evening to add a piece of hardware, and to reconfigure my kernel. 

In my machine's cmos, there is an option asking what should be done when the power goes off and then comes back on. The choices are: stay off, turn on, or return to former power status, which means that the machine should go into whatever power state it was at when the power went off.

The last time I had some one here about 3 weeks ago who hellped me reconfigure my bios after upgrading it, the power option described above was set by me to former power status. As far as I know, it shouldn't have changed since.

Anyway, when I added my hardware this evening, I also upgraded to ext3. Since this machine is acting now as the main server (dns, mail, ETC.) for my domain, I wanted to check if the former status choice really works. So, while the box was running (all users were logged off), I hit my serge protector's power switch, causing it to shut off power to the server. When I turned the power back on after about a minute, the pc stayed off. Assuming the power option described above is still set to former power status (I have no reason to suspect otherwise), why isn't the machine powering back up when the power comes back on, and when it was left on before the power was turned off? Is there some sort of a difference between me flipping the power switch on my serge protector, and the power going off naturally? Thanks.
Greg