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.
Mine turns off at 2 or if noone has been watching for 10 minutes after 2am and turns on at 5:45. Nobody ever uses it during that time. It’s pointless to keep it running. Additional bonus is that it auto updates all containers each morning. Yes, I sometimes wake up at 4 or 5 and it would be cool if it were running but it shows that you do not NEED it.
Server is on 24/7 and it has a UPS for the momentary brown outs I have during heavy winds. It would be silly if it’s off for any reason besides maintenance, even more so since it holds multiple game worlds in addition to some web and chat stuff.
Additionally, night time is the time of creating backups. A second server pushes its backup also at night too. Potentially long running tasks like database migration I do at night. Lastly, when my server starts up it needs almost an hour until it truly reaches idle (potentially because it has to keep millions of files in sync with syncthing, I have to investigate). So my servers are more busy at night than at day
My NAS and production server run 24/7, I’ve got a dev server that I turn off if I’m not expecting to use it for a week or so. Usually when I do that, I immediately need it for something and I’m away from home. I have chosen equipment to try and minimize energy use to allow for constant running.
My view on UPS is it’s a crucial part of getting your availability percentage up. As my home lab turned into crucial services I used to replace commercial cloud options, that became more important to me. Whether it is to you will depend on what you’re running and why.
I’ve heard that one of the most likely times for hard drives to fail is on power up, and it also makes sense to me that the heating/cooling cycles would be bad for the magnetic coating, so my NAS is configured to keep them spinning, and it hasn’t been turned off since I last did a drive change.
UPS depends on usecase and on the stability of your electrical supply (which varies greatly from place to place). I just leave everything running and have it configured to restart automatically on power restore (if it fails, which it rarely does).
My server has 5 harddisks (real spinning ones), and everybody says they live longer when running 24/7, so that’s what I do. They are 6 or 7 years old now. S.M.A.R.T says they are clean.
Power outages occur sometimes. Once I had a problem with a file system afterwards. Later I got a small ups (for just 10 or 20min) and no trouble anymore.
I let my production systems (1x NAS/1x Proxmox Host) on 24/7 and shut down test systems or my onside backup. I do it mainly to save some power and also noise, because all servers are in my office room. I would prefere some low power/noise machines that can keep running 24/7 and if you really need some horse power because you would want to test something or play around, you can power it on and shut down whenever you want.
But I dont use any UPS, because the power grid is very stable where I live but I have snapshots every hour or so. I can live with an hour of data loss if shit hits the fan.
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.
On/off:
I have 5 main chassis excluding desktops. Prod cluster is all flash, standalone host has one flash array, one spinning rust array, NAS is all spinning rust. I have a big enough server disk array that spinning it up is actually a power sink and the Dell firmware takes a looong time to get all the drives up on reboot.
TLDR: Not off as a matter of day/night, off as a matter of summer/winter for heat.
Winter: all on
Summer:
prod cluster on (3x vSAN - it gets really angry if it doesn’t have cluster consistency)
NAS on
standalone server off, except to test ESXi patches and when vCenter reboots cause it to be WoL’d (vpxd sends a wake to all stand by hosts on program init)
main desktop on
alt desktops off
VMs are a different story. Normally I just turn them on and off as needed regardless of season, though I will typically turn off more of my “optional” VMs to reduce summer workload in addition to powering off the one server. Rough goal is to reduce thermal load as to not kill my AC as quickly which is probably running above its duty cycle to keep up. Physical wise, these servers are virtualized so this on/off load doesn’t cycle the array.
Because all four of my main servers are the same hypervisor (for now, VMware ESXi), VMs can move among the prod cluster to balance load autonomously, and I can move VMs on or off the standalone host by drag-and-drop. When the standalone host is off, I usually move turn it’s VMs off and move them onto the prod cluster so I don’t get daily “backup failure” emails from the NAS.
UPS: Power in my area is pretty stable, but has a few phase hiccups in the summer. (I know it’s a phase hiccup because I mapped out which wall plus are on which phase, confirmed with a multimeter than I’m on two legs of a 3-phase grid hand-off, and watched which devices blip off during an event) For something like a light that will just flicker or a laptop/phone charger that has a high capacitance, such blips are a non issue. Smaller ones can even be eaten by the massive power supplies my Dell servers have. But, my Cisco switches are a bit sensitive to it and tend to sing me the song of their people when the power flickers - aka fan speed 100% boot up whining. Larger blips will also boop the Dell servers, but I don’t usually see breaks more than 3-5m.
Current UPS setup is:
rack split into A/B power feeds, with servers plugged into both and every other one flipped A or B as it’s primary
single plug devices (like NAS) plugged into just one
"common purpose" devices on the same power feed (ex: my primary firewall, primary switches, and my NAS for backups are on feed A, but my backup disks and my secondary switches are on feed B)
one 1500VA UPS per feed (two total) - aggregate usage is 600-800w
one 1500VA desktop UPS handling my main tower, one monitor, and my PS5 (which gets unreasonably upset about losing power, so it gets the battery backup)
With all that setup, the gauges in the front of the 3 UPSes all show roughly 15-20m run time in summer, and 20-25m in winter. I know one may be lower than displayed because it’s battery is older, but even if it fails and dumps it’s redundant load onto the main newer UPS I’ll still have 7-10m of battery at worst case and that’s all I really need to weather most power related issues at my location.
My servers are on 24/7, currently they use about 100watts each (I have 2 running), which adds maybe $20 to my electric bill. I also have stuff such as mailcow, nextcloud, and mattermost running, turning off every night would make those applications useless.
I have a shit APC desktop UPS. It keeps them on for 10-15 minutes at best.
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