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.
You may not but your phone will fail over to data if it loses its lease and stuff like background update tasks will cease to function (like Windows Update or dnf cron)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope always on. Also runs homeaasiatant so if it was off I would lose the schedule use for lights, or phone connection for on/off etc. But yes, get a UPS, even ifvyou haven’t had a power faikure a good UPS will monitor and correct voltage amd dirty power. It has saved me a couple of times.
24/7 I have home assistant and other things that depend on it being up. It’s not a beast but it definitely uses less than my oven. My electric use is big already from my electric car so the small savings wouldn’t be noticeable alongside my solar panels.
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.
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