I may be a bit too sleep deprived...

We had a short power cut a few nights ago, which reset my NAS. My NAS's motherboard is second hand, and the previous owner configured it to reset it's bios if it didn't shut down properly. I should really get around to making it stop doing that.

So I didn't think too hard about it when the services I run off it weren't working. I figured I'd just have to plug it into a display and get it booting again. No problem!

But it's in kind of an annoying position, far away from any display, so I didn't want to move it. Instead, I ordered a USB HDMI capture card, to plug into the raspberry pi that sits on top of it. My plan was to RDP on to the pi, sort out the bios stuff from there, and we're good to go!

I order the capture card, and do some searching to find out how I might view the capture card's stream on a raspberry pi. I conclude I should set OBS studio up. Unfortunately, my version of raspbian is quite out of date, and after an hour or so of trying to get it to build, I give up. Further searching tells me VLC player has a video capture option. I guess I'll try using that then.

The capture card shows up. I plug it in, go upstairs to my desktop, RDP on to my pi, and see a blank screen. I wonder if the bios has some kind of sleep feature.
It then occurs to me that the capture card won't help me with keyboard inputs, so I can't just... shake my mouse to wake it up. Well, that's not a problem, I can set an RDP client up on my laptop, connect to the pi for video and plug a keyboard into my NAS.

It takes me a while to get everything set up on my laptop, but after all that I'm still getting a blank image from the capture card. Kind of worrying, but maybe I just need to restart the NAS.
I push the restart button, and nothing happens. That's weird. I'd expect to hear the fans spin up at the very least... Oh. The NAS wasn't even turned on in the first place. Well, that's kind of annoying, but at least I have all this stuff to help me fix it now.
I push the power button. It boots, and I see a pixelated rendition of the motherboard's boot splash in VLC player. There are just enough pixels in the display for me to see it's booting properly. It dawns on me that I could have just turned the bloody thing on a couple of nights ago and been done with it.

Adding insult to injury, it occurs to me later on that I could have skipped all the raspberry pi shenanigans. The time wasted trying to get OBS studio installed on it, the time wasted getting an RDP client set up on my laptop to connect to it. I could have just plugged the capture card into my laptop.

I need to get more sleep