I think that as you move towards replacing cloud services with self-hosted ones you take on the responsibility of providing the same reliability as the cloud services.
Just installing a UPS will let you ride through 99% of all power failures because most of them are only a few seconds long. My UPS says that my entire HomeLab, including Internet modems runs at about 100W, and it will last for the better part of an hour.
The question then becomes about longer outages, that run the UPS dry. There are two issues.
The first issue is system shutdowns, if they just crash when the battery ends, then you run the risk of data corruption and disk buffers that haven't flushed. But in truth, this is probably a minor possibility. Your servers were up, but the rest of your house was already down. No feed from the cameras, no events in HomeAssistant, no WiFi, no nothing. This means virtually no activity on your servers for an extended period of time.
This doesn't eliminate the possibility of corruption, but it makes it less likely.
The second issue is getting the servers back up and running when the power returns. This can be a bit more complicated, what if the power is up and down a bit before the UPS has some charge built up?
Maybe your best just leaving them off for a bit until things have stabilized and the UPS has a charge.
NUTs deals with both of these issues in an automated fashion. It can shut your services down in a controlled manner so that they don't crash when the battery dies. It can bring your servers back on line when the power is restored and stable.
For me, my main concern is for when the power failure goes past he battery life when I'm on vacation. I won't be able to go and push power buttons on the server. NUTs can get a bit tricky if you are looking for 100% hands-free operation. I can deal with anything when I'm home, but away in problematic.
I've decided to leave NUTs out of the mix for now. All of my servers are configured to turn on when power is restored, and all of the services are configured to start up automatically when the server boots. I'm content to let the UPS drain dry, crash the mostly idle servers when that happens, and then reboot when power is restored.
Feathers are about 20-25 cents each, while my preferred Big Ben's are about 8 cents. I'm happy to get 4 - 6 shaves out of a Big Ben. The thing about the Big Ben's is that the last shave isn't rough, it just more work to get a really close shave.
That's absolutely a waste. Note that not all brands and models of blades are the same and it's very possible that you get a better/smoother shave on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th shave on a blade.
I have a bunch of these, mostly vintage. My favorite is a 1951 Gillette Tech. Super comfortable shave. There are different styles, the early ones going back to about about 1910 have an "open comb" design, but changed over to safety bars around 1935. Closer to 1960 the twist butterfly design became more popular.
Razors vary according to how agressive they are, which usually relates to how much blade is exposed to the skin. My experience has been that the least aggressive blades from Gillette came out of the 1950's. I don't really know about super modern razors.
Blades vary based on sharpness, smoothness and lifespan. There is no universal "better". Thick whiskers need a sharper blade, and sensitive skin needs a smoother blade. Teflon coated blades can even get sharper after a use or two when the Teflon wears off a bit.
I've bought quite a few razors at flea markets for less than $10 and they can be excellent. That favorite 51 Gillette Tech was about $20 on eBay. I have fine whiskers and sensitive skin, and my favorite blade is a Big Ben by Lord. Cheap-ass blades that cost about $8.00 for 100. They are medium sharp and smooth, and last 4-6 shaves for me.
The other part is the "wet" stuff. Soap and paraphernalia. Skip the drug store crap and get hold of some good soaps or creams. It makes a difference. George Trumper is a good expensive brand that will at least tell you how much better a good cream can be. Personally I like RazoRock soaps.
Brushes can be super expensive. I have a few very expensive badger brushes, but honestly, my go to daily brush is a $15 Omega boar brush. It's huge, and when brand new smelled like a disgusting blend of moth balls and wet pig as well as being way too stiff. If you break them in, then the bristles get spit ends, with the result being a brush that's soft at the tip but stiff overall.
Lastly, a shaving scuttle. Basically, it looks like the love child of a teapot and a big mug. It's ceramic and double walled, with a spout to put hot water inside the gap between the walls. It has ribs on the inside of the bowl to improve foaming. Get it hot, smear some soap on the bottom and whisk it up with the brush to get hot foam.
Note that these are not the same as the delicate porcelain things you find in antique stores. Best to source them from Etsy.
Yes, but it shows information about recent/current logins and requires access a file called wtmp (or something like that, off the top of my head), and that requires privileged access.
My usual use case where I mix it up is looking at a log file and and I just want to see the last few entries. So my brain 🧠 tells my fingers to type "last logfile", and when I get the permission message it tells my mouth to go, "Doh!".
For the past 30 years or so, my brain always tells me to type "last" instead of "tail". This usually results in some kind of "Permission denied" message that confuses me for a few seconds.
Harvey's was good way, way back when they still had items like the Ultraburger. But that was like 30 years ago. Then they simplified their menu and at around that time the quality of everything went down noticeably. Then we stopped going there because we always felt gross afterwards. Haven't been back in decades.
When I started out, I really wanted to do it this way too. A bare metal install just seemed a little crude, and I thought I might want to run other firewall related services from that node. I had technical issues, and OPNSense just didn't want to run under Proxmox for me.
Finally, I said to hell with it and went with a bare metal install and, in retrospect, I'm glad it worked out that way.
OPNSense just works, and I don't feel like there are any opportunities lost due to the bare metal install. Instead, it just feels really clean and sequestered from the homelab cluster as it should be.
I totally get the desire to want to muck about with Proxmox hosting and learn about how it works. That's the right attitude. But hosting an OPNSense virtual machine isn't the right starting place.
As a beginner, do beginner stuff. Install a Technitium container and learn about DNS. Install Immich, or Jellyfin or an *arr stack. But not a firewall as a VM.
Yeah, there is a line of units that has a PCI slot that then requires a riser card in order to be able to use it. The problem is that those units, from what I've seen, tend to cost at least twice as much as the M910Q/M710Q. Even the M920Q/M720Q are significantly more expensive. Not to mention, a bit more difficult to get hold of.
IMHO, once you're talking about dropping $300-$350 on one of these models with the riser card, you really have to think hard about whether it's worth it for 6th/7th generation Core i5 processors. Especially if you're looking at a cluster of three. It seems highly probable that you could get something with an 11th/12th generation processor and multiple or 2.5GB ethernet ports for only a bit more, and you'd end up only needing two of them instead of three, and price might end up being a wash.
I am really, really curious to see how external USB 2.5GB or 5GB adapters would work. I'm getting the impression that they are a lot more reliable than they were even a few years ago, and might be a viable, cheap option.
All that being said, network speed hasn't been an issue for me so far, and I'm not convinced that CEPH + HA, is a path I should be going down. Or a path that's worth it for most self-hosters.
So far, the only thing that I've encountered that pushes the CPU on an ongoing basis is Frigate, and even that is performing well and not affecting other containers on the same host. But I'm still adding services to my cluster, so who knows.
I watched a whole bunch of videos about those and it totally looks like they would work electronically. But most of them wouldn't fit in any of the ports on the back without modification and 3D printing magic. Some people left them "just hanging out".
I've got the article just about ready to go. I got myself swallowed up in a project to implement Frigate (finally) and just didn't get around to posting it. It should be up tomorrow.
I think that as you move towards replacing cloud services with self-hosted ones you take on the responsibility of providing the same reliability as the cloud services.
Just installing a UPS will let you ride through 99% of all power failures because most of them are only a few seconds long. My UPS says that my entire HomeLab, including Internet modems runs at about 100W, and it will last for the better part of an hour.
The question then becomes about longer outages, that run the UPS dry. There are two issues.
The first issue is system shutdowns, if they just crash when the battery ends, then you run the risk of data corruption and disk buffers that haven't flushed. But in truth, this is probably a minor possibility. Your servers were up, but the rest of your house was already down. No feed from the cameras, no events in HomeAssistant, no WiFi, no nothing. This means virtually no activity on your servers for an extended period of time.
This doesn't eliminate the possibility of corruption, but it makes it less likely.
The second issue is getting the servers back up and running when the power returns. This can be a bit more complicated, what if the power is up and down a bit before the UPS has some charge built up?
Maybe your best just leaving them off for a bit until things have stabilized and the UPS has a charge.
NUTs deals with both of these issues in an automated fashion. It can shut your services down in a controlled manner so that they don't crash when the battery dies. It can bring your servers back on line when the power is restored and stable.
For me, my main concern is for when the power failure goes past he battery life when I'm on vacation. I won't be able to go and push power buttons on the server. NUTs can get a bit tricky if you are looking for 100% hands-free operation. I can deal with anything when I'm home, but away in problematic.
I've decided to leave NUTs out of the mix for now. All of my servers are configured to turn on when power is restored, and all of the services are configured to start up automatically when the server boots. I'm content to let the UPS drain dry, crash the mostly idle servers when that happens, and then reboot when power is restored.
There's a risk, but I think I understand it.