Interesting. I wonder if that’s a bug in the Photon app. I use Voyager on mobile. When I tap to create a new post, there is a toggle for link, image, or text.
For a while I had a low-power server for my personal things that stayed on all the time, and a more powerful computer that hosted a minecraft server. As the player count dwindled, I decided to make the minecraft server automatically shut down at midnight, and wake up at 8 in the morning using rtcwake. And eventually I disabled the rtcwake thing entirely, and made the smaller server run a webui that could wake up the minecraft server using wake-on-lan. So if anyone wanted to play, they would first have to remotely turn on the server through a web page. This was all password-protected ofcourse.
Also, no, I don’t use a UPS. I’ve never seen anyone use a UPS in the country where I live, and I don’t think I’ve experienced a power outtage in like 4 years. Whether or not you need a UPS seems to be largely dependent on where you live.
Entirely depends on the usecase. If it's a NAS and you only watch a few movies in the evening: Turn it off.
I bult a fairly power-efficient server. Consumes less than 20W and spins down the harddisks if not in use.
I can't turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore, my website would go down, my Fediverse instance wouldn't pull any posts from American people who are awake during parts of the night. My emails and chat messages wouldn't get delivered.
I don't have a UPS. Also depends on the circumstances. I use ext4 as a filesystem which is kind of robust enough to handle power outages. And they're rare where I live. A UPS would draw additional power and cost money. It's not worth it for me at home.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore
Personally I try to avoid making anything in my home actually dependant on my server. I have a single lamp that can only be controlled from my phone and that’s only because it’s so rarely used that I didn’t want to put in the effort. Everything else is local first and only gets extended functionality from my server running.
I’ve had a couple issues with my zigbee stuff over the years on the server side and I would be really pissed if I wouldn’t be able to turn my lights on because I haven’t gotten around to fixing my server yet.
Sure. All that stuff has consequences. I also used to run a DNS Adblocker on that machine. So after a power outage, all the lights in the kitchen and livingroom (those are the smart ones) would turn on at full brighness (their default state). The internet wouldn't ever come back since it's missing its DNS server. Obviously I can't get any notification of the incident, since my server is down... And I fall back to being reachable via phone or SMS. If my wife tells me via chat or email... That's down, too.
I'm still working on a better solution. It ain't easy, though. It's certainly easier to use some cloud services and have other people keep the infrastructure running in some datacenters which have more redundancy... We have light switches, though. All my smart home stuff is just retrofitted. So we can still turn it off or on with the wall switches. I won't change that until I come up with a solution to this problem. Until then, I've dialed things a bit back and I refrain from making everything "smart" when I can't do it 100% reliably.
And it's just some lights and the washing machine. While I am a nerd and tinkerer, I don't see any good reason to own a smart toaster, fridge or Alexa. YMMV, of course.
yes, the phone switches to mobile. It's just all the selfhosted services that are missing, like my nextcloud, matrix chat, etc. And several apps complaining they can't sync anymore or send messages. I don't use that many cloud services, so it'll be a lot of things I rely on. Browsing the web works. But I've changed things and moved the adblocker. So now that one issue is gone. It still doesn't solve the real issue... But at least the wifi comes back on its own.
Currently yes. I have a bit of a non-standard setup though. Like a business contract with my internet service provider, which includes a few perks that are required to send mail and are missing on a normal residential internet connection (static ip, dns reverse pointer). And generally 95% of people recommend not to do email yourself. I might change in the future. Back in the days it was a few bucks more a month, but they increased prices substantially. Either I move my mailserver to a VPS or save me some time and effort and switch to some email service like everyone else.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore
If you have Hue bulbs, you can buy little radios that attach to your light switch (or replacement light switches) that will still operate your lights when the server is down or the network is unavailable. It’s a worthwhile upgrade.
You can do whatever you want. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “wrong”. A big part of homelabbing is to try stuff. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine, you learned something, and that was the point.
For me, I don’t see a UPS as essential. It’s generally a good idea, but not strictly essential. My servers are on 24/7, because I have services that do things overnight for me. I also know that some people access my lab when I’m not awake, so I just leave it on so it can be ready for anything at any time. It poses some unique challenges sometimes when running stuff that’s basically 24/7/365.
I have a ‘dumb’ UPS for my synology NAS to protect against short power outages - it’s done after a minute or 10 though so if I’m not at home it’ll crash anyway. In Retrospect I should’ve gone for a smart one that will shutdown the NAS.
My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it’s jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.
Could be that it is hosting services that are only actively used instead of passively doing stuff, so no real need to have the server on when you’re sleeping. For me turning it off and on again would be more of a hassle than it’s worth it.
Agreed. First of all that would make running backups more complex, and would require either manual interaction, or very careful automation of some kind.
And any public facing service (like blog and some stuff) would still need to be accessible somehow, so…
I have solar, so the power consumption is negligible, I am already mostly selling yo the network and not “consuming” most of the days. Also, the server stuff sits in a sound proofed and ventilated compartment in the most remote area of the house.
Among the many things I run are my own email servers so, yeah gotta be up all the time. And yes I have a UPS behind every electronic device in my house except the TV because if that dies I get to buy a new one.
I’ve probably spent upwards of $2000 on UPSes and replacement batteries over the last 20 years, but if it saved even one of my servers from taking a hit it was worth it. Servers are expensive and my time is valuable to me.
No one should be powering off their servers. Thats really not the way to go about anything. Now there’s nothing stopping you from doing that either if you want to and it makes you happy or your life easier.
But if you want a simple answer to a simple question, no, nobody sane is doing that lol
In pretty much any enterprise using the public cloud. Everything is auto scaling, so shutdowns when not needed. Dev environments shutdown over night… If you’re not shutting down and scaling in the public cloud, you’re doing it wrong.
No we shut them down. They get deallocated the same way as shutting down a virtual server does. They’re not containers, the scaling part just turns them on and off based on workload or schedule
I see where your head is at here, but it sounds like you’re focusing on containerized items. A lot of people are going to look at you real weird if you think of scaling down a container as equivalent to shutting down a server. We can all see where your mind is going and there is logic there, but it’s more akin to closing chrome when you’re not using it than it is to shutting down the computer running chrome.
Even physical hardware, if your paying power you can have clusters of physical hardware power up and down based on usage. There is no point in having 10 physical hosts running when the workload for n+1 means 3 servers overnight. With bnc, ipmi, ilo, idrac it will power them up as needed.
I have a small 6U rack in my hallway which is where all the server stuff sits. There are 1U UPS units, but I haven’t had the need for it yet. However after replacing motherboard on this current machine I forgot to turn on option for auto start after power failure. My servers are mostly for collecting data regarding temperature, humidity and other metrics around the house, glass house and other parts. Same machine also collects surveillance data from cameras around the property which detect human and animal shapes.
So since machine rarely does long term calculations or data processing it’s okay that it doesn’t have UPS, since no data would be coming anyway without power.
Meh. I lose power every 3 or 4 years on average. A UPS just doesn’t make sense for me. (When I lived in Virginia it was once a month on average, so for sure it made sense…)
Like he was saying, it’s more than just power loss. It’s a way of “sanitizing” the power as it comes in. This is “usually” not a problem. But dirty power is arguably worse than power outages. If the voltages fluctuate or get low for whatever reason that puts a big strain on your power supplies.
This could happen because you run a vacuum on the same circuit and your house is old, guy down the street electrocutes himself or the power coming in from the electric company is ‘dirty’ because they have an issue with transformers or up stream somewhere. It can be imperceptible to you, but your tech notices.
Same here. I would say total power outages are a bit more rare than every three years. But we had some failure last year and two years before that a neighbor dug through some cables and most of the street went dark. Sometimes I contribute and plug in some (old) electrical device that isn't okay anymore. This year I got some water into the extension cord while cleaning outside... And since we have ground fault protection for the house, I had to reboot everything. The server and the 4 harddisks in it are perfectly fine. And have been for like a decade. I don't think I need to pay for an UPS and the additional power it needs.
I personally only turn it off when someone’s visiting over night and the noise disturbs them, otherwise I just leave it on nonstop. Mainly because it would annoy me to try to open whatever and find out I have to turn on the server first. I don’t have a UPS and never even thought about getting one (for the server, I’m thinking of getting one for my 3D printer).
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