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How do you keep your home servers online during powercuts? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent. 1 per day is normal. They last between 1 and 8 hours. A day without powercuts feels like a special occasion.

My machine is powered by a desktop ups which is terrible. It is only supposed to power everything for a few minutes to shutdown safely. But it is cheap and I don't know much about other affordable alternatives.

How do you folks who self host at home deal with powercuts? Any recommendations? 8 hours of uptime from a ups sounds almost impossible or totally unaffordable to me.

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[–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

What services are you running? Which of them are critical and need to stay up?

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Not a lot of critical services but I would absolutely need things like pihole.

    Just realized, I can host the critical ones on the ARM device and the services which I can do without for some time can stay on the current server.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Then I'd go that route. Here all is on RPies, alas not the NAS, but those disks are almost always in sleep mode.

    Small tip on the storage, go for a cheap SSD external (alie has a few for next to nothing), get at least 2-4, as reliability issues exists, but will show themselves within days or not. Only use rhe sd card to boot from, mount / from the ssd.

    1 RPi and an ssd can runa while on a small UPS. (Need to get me one as well)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Not sure if I'm a fan of the "AliExpress SSD" recommendation. They're badly built and unreliable, you won't know what capacity you get, and they can be incredibly slow.

    Regular, known-brand SSDs have dropped so much in price and are very affordable at low capacities. That should be a much safer investment than buying heaps of most likely unusable drives.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Depends. I used loads of 'known brand' micro SD cards and went trough them one per month. I ordered 2 KingSpec and 'Kunup' sticks, just to test. (june '20) Of each, 1 worked perfectly, 1 was not good enough for continuous use. The active Kingspec has been active for years now, but I use less then 20 GB of the 120 GB SSD. (Really need to clean up logs, OS shouldn't use more then 5G, data is on NAS) The ones that were not reliable enough for continuous use are still in use for transport.

    It worked here and proved a lot cheaper then replacing the SD card every month. As they are Chineese 'unknown brand', ymmv hugely. (and don't buy something that will just fit, as trade GB isn't IT GB and Chineese GBs vary even more) It however is always a gamble to buy something from the other side of the world. (but hey, every 'known brand' is made in China anyway now, so we already are hugely locked into that country)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    With the price of SSDs I'd recommend an internal SSD and SATA or m.2 to USB adapter instead. That way you can choose the enclosure to provide enough cooling, and even open the adapter and add a fan if you really stress the SSD.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    You can boot from the SSD directly btw

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I know, and from network, but I haven't put time into enabeling that. (and I have loads of < 1G SD cards that need to be used up anyway)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    A new RPI should have USB boot enabled out of the box. I know the first year after release you had to update the firmware to get it working, but iirc that is no longer needed. Just burn the image to the stick instead of the SD card and it's plug and play.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Interesting to know. As of which version? RPi 4? I have to admit, I never tried it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    I'm pretty sure rpi3 as well.

    When I started it worked out of the box on rpi3 already and a year after rpi4 came on the market the firmware was updated to support it there as well. New pis ship with recent Firmware, so they work out of the box, early rpi4 might need flashing.

    You'll find plenty of tutorials if you Google "RPI 3/4 USB boot". I run mine from a SSD in a sata-usb adapter. The storage space and peace of mind, not having to fear corruption is definitely worth it (also SSDs are dirt cheap right now (just make sure you have an adapter that supports all block device access modes if you need all the speed you can get, there is one that is not always supported by the adapter)).

    (Edit: sorry, only talking about the B+ variant! I don't have experience with other variants)

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