This bugged me for quite some time now: Ever since a very nice dumpster revealed a stripped Supermicro server chassis including a Supermicro X8DTL board (Dual-1366) to me, the BIOS battery of that system seemed to be empty all the time. You see, I use this machine as an offline backup, so once every couple of months I fire it up, transfer my data, and unplug it from power and ethernet. And almost always it doesn’t start right up because the CMOS data is gone. Ideally it should be a headless unit, so that’s highly inconvenient.

I finally got around to test this – the fix will be another project for some day in the future. […]