I’ve watched enough Lock Picking Lawyer never to want a consumer ‘smart lock.’ Half of them can be opened with a magnet. Maybe commercial grade is better, but I’ve been locked out of my job after every power failure for the last 10 years, until someone comes along with a physical key.
Re homeassistant on a Pi: homeassistant does a lot of database transactions, so you may want to have db storage on something other than an SD card.
You can only spin drives down if they’re idle. If you have a service that touches it - say, homeassistant logging data, tvheadend updating EPG - then they’re going to keep spinning.
I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.
I’m not a huge docker expert, but I recently spun up a tandoor…dev, and their config instructions explicitly point out a couple of mounts that have to be volumes and can not be binds.
Docker’s own comments are https://docs.docker.com/engine/storage/volumes/ which my tl;dr is faster, can be shared by multiple containers, and can be a remote (NFS/CIFS) target.
I’d guess that maintainers use the volume structure to let docker handle the details of creating and maintaining the mount, rather than put it on the user, who may be spinning up their first-ever docker and may make all kind of naive mistakes.
My ISP seems to use just normal DHCP for assigning addresses and honors re-use requests. The only times my IP addresses have changed has been I’ve changed the MAC or UUID that connects. I’ve been off-line for a week, come back, and been given the same address. Both IPv4 and v6.
If one really wants their home systems to be publicly accessible, it’s easy enough to get a cheap vanity domain and point it at whatever address. rDNS won’t work, which would probably interfere with email, but most services don’t really need it. It’s a bit more complicated to detect when your IP changes and script a DNS update, but certainly do-able, if (like OP) one is hell bent on avoiding any off-site hardware.
Daniel Stenberg claims that the curl bug reporting system is effectively DDOSed by AI wrongly reporting various issues. Doesn’t seem like a good feature in a code auditor.
The UPS needs some power to keep its batteries full. Could be that it’s triggering off some threshold to do a charge cycle instead of just running a constant trickle. I’ve noticed that my laptop and phone charge that way, for example.
…hanging from their cables…
It really depends on what your data is and how hard it would be to recreate. I keep a spare HD in a $40/year bank box & rotate it every 3 months. Most of the content is media - pictures, movies, music. Financial records would be annoying to recreate, but if there’s a big enough disaster to force me to go to the off-site backups, I think that’ll be the least of my troubles. Some data logging has a replica database on a VPS.
My upload speed is terrible, so I don’t want to put a media library in the cloud. If I did any important daily content creation, I’d probably keep that mirrored offsite with rsync, but I feel like the spirit of an offsite backup is offline and asynchronous, so things like ransomware don’t destroy your backups, too.
With only 15U, assuming devices don’t stick out the back, I’d move it face-up, so devices are more hanging from their ears than cantilevered. A full, 42/48U rack is extremely top-heavy and tipping during move is a serious risk, but 15U is fine. It’s still very dense, and OP should try to ratchet-strap it to hard points in the trailer.
It kind of amazes me that, in this day and age, email has turned out to be the lynchpin of security. Email as a 2FA endpoint. Email password reset systems. If email is compromised, everything else falls. They used to tell us not to put anything in email that you wouldn’t put on a postcard…how did this happen?
Wonder if there’s an opportunity there. Some way to archive one’s self-hosted, public-facing content, either as a static VM or, like archive.org, just the static content of URLs. I’m imagining a service one’s heirs could contract to crawl the site, save it all somewhere, and take care of permanent maintenance, renewing domains, etc. Ought to be cheap enough to maintain the content; presumably low traffic in most cases. Set up an endowment-type fee structure to pay for perpetual domain reg.
At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.
If you self-host, how much of that content disappear when your descendants shut down your instance?
I used to host a bunch of academic data, but when I stopped working, there was no institutional support. Turned off the server and it all went away (still Wayback Machine archives). I mean, I don’t really care whether my social media presence outlives me, the experience just made me aware that personal pet projects are pretty sensitive to that person.
Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn’t even have to have HDs for every system.
These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.
If you’re already running Pihole, I’d look at other things to do with the Pi.
https://www.adafruit.com/ has a bunch of sensors you can plug into the Pi, python libraries to make them work, and pretty good documentation/examples to get started. If you know a little python, it’s pretty easy to set up a simple web server just to poll those sensors and report their current values. Only slightly more complicated to set up cron jobs to log data to a database and a web page to make graphs.
It’s pretty straightforward to put https://www.home-assistant.io/ in a docker on a Pi. If you have your own local sensors, it will keep track of them, but it can also track data from external sources, like weather & air quality. There a bunch of inexpensive smart plugs ($20-ish) that will let you turn stuff on/off on a schedule or in response to sensor data.
IMO, Pi isn’t great for transport-intensive services like radarr or jellyfin, but, with a Usb HD/SSD might be an option.
I’ve always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won’t corrupt/damage the backup.
Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.
3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.
2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing
1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.
If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it’s really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I’d probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.
All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.
TY. Looks like the T6 is pro-only. Googling around, it looks like ventilation control may be one of the things that separate their pro-level T6/T10 from their DIY-level T5/T9. That’s disappointing.
Does the Honeywell T6 give you separate control of temperature and fan? That is, can you turn air circulation on/off, even when the temperature wouldn’t trigger heating/cooling?
I’ve been watching pm2.5 in my house, and the HVAC filter does a pretty good job of keeping it down if I run the fan, but that fan takes a lot of energy, and I’d like to turn it off when the air is pretty clean.
My Pi spends all of its time around 55°C in a 20-25°C room. Main server idles at 47°C. Those aren’t worrying temps.