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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My LG TV is blocked from my network and always has been. However, the andriod tv connected to it is a different thing, so it’s more or less lost cause anyways and I haven’t had enough incentive to block the android box from the rest of network since it’d need some tweaking so that casting and other occasionally used features still work. And even if I’d block the android tv box there’s still our cellphones gathering all the data, so I’m pretty much just running things on hopium that EU offers at least some protection on my data.




  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyztoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhy homelab?
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    19 days ago

    There’s plenty more reasons than filesystem corruption to use clean shutdown and even just plain UPS without any status information to the host. I haven’t seen a full drive corruption due to power loss ever. Various levels of corruption, yes, but not ‘all the data is gone’ scenario due to filesystem being broken. But I have seen multiple hard drives which have died on host shutdown without any warning (no smart errors or such), after power loss they just refused to start again.

    Just today we had multiple short (~30 second) power outages and without UPS that would’ve put considerable strain on my hardware. Gladly those are pretty rare and those were well short enough that my UPS kept the system running, without one that would’ve meant that my hypervisor would’ve crashed and that would’ve resulted on several unclean reboots for the VMs.

    Also, back to filesystems, with selfhosting, some kind of hypervisor is often in the picture, so the drive activity is generally much higher than with single workstation and corruption on a single file or some part of filesystem is way more likely. Total data loss is pretty unlikely, but a corrupted VM image can be a pretty big deal, regardless if it’s filesystem or single file which is the main issue.

    there’s no standardized mechanism for forcing applications to save

    On Linux (and I guess BSD and other *nix variants) there is. SIGTERM is exactly for that situation. Sure, programs can choose to ignore it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen at least any FOSS software which wouldn’t respect that. Of course the program might crash and cause loss of data, but the mechanism is there.

    You’re of course generally correct about modern filesystems being more resilient to power loss, but they’re not immune to problems and also you’ve omitted a large chunk of other reasons why people like to have UPS on their system, with or without monitoring them.

    For me personally the hardware is least interesting part of running a homelab. I’d happily run everything on VPS if there was no constraints on money or bandwidth (among other things). But as the limitations are there running things on my hardware is a necessary evil and for that an UPS or two are practically must to have to prolong life span of hardware and prevent data losses. Of course that’s just one box to check on the stack, but when planning for a home server setup for anything I’d say it’s a pretty vital part for the whole setup.



  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyztoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhy homelab?
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    19 days ago

    Modern filesystems can corrupt as well with unclean shutdown. They are just less likely to do so. My server stores photos of our life over couple of decades with other nearly irreplaceable data so having the UPS and clean shutdown on power loss gives at least some confidence that the files stay where they are.

    Of course I also run backups of the data, but it’s another layer on data safety setup.



  • Just to add to your points, all of those are already a thing in colder climates. Google DC in Finland is one example. When it’s heavily below zero half of the year it’s just not possible to run open loop systems and there’s plenty of use for the excess heat. Some DCs just donate the waste heat to municipal heating. PR obviously plays role in that, but that’s easy way to get rid of the heat and datacenters don’t need to manage the heating network and fluctuations on demand, so they also benefit from someone who’ll just take the heat away from their ‘hands’. Also sound is automatically better managed since you need decent insulation on the buildings to avoid condensation and other problems which come when temperature differences are pretty huge between inside and outside of the building.



  • Also, as there’s no standardized way to count these, Finland with mandatory conscription has a crapload of expenses which aren’t included in miltary expenses. In current global situation I don’t think increasing expenses was a wrong call and it’s not purely black and white, there’s also at least some jobs to finns trough the investments, but I’d say that our money would’ve been better spent to something else than US and Israel tech as (specially USA) has not been really reliable partner.

    But also the reality is that even without those expenses our budget has been negative for quite a while, so something had to be done. I’m not saying that current government had the best actions, and they have objectively made things worse on some places, but just waiting for a miracle wouldn’t have worked either. But that’s a whole another discussion.


  • My brain reads those as ‘thee’, or however that old English should be written (thee, thou, thy…), so the image is that someone pretty pompous Englishman from 1700s with a powdered wig found fediverse.

    Plus I tested those on duck.ai just for fun and it has absolutely no trouble of reading the thorns, so it only makes reading harder for other humans, specially for us whose native language isn’t English.


  • didn’t he break into a network closet and patch directly into their servers?

    No. He placed a computer in a unlocked network closet and used that to download a bunch of data from JSTOR (which he had acces to, and a lot of the data is public domain anyways) and kinda-sorta caused DDoS attack against the service. Prosecution then slapped him with a shitload of federal charges which (in my opinion) were largely at least massively exaggerated if not straight made up. Threat of 50 year jail sentence and million(s) in fines then pushed him to take his own life.

    Wikipedia has pretty detailed info about him and the whole case.



  • Sister of mine bought a summer cottage (or more like a full blown, two story, house) for less than 30k€. For that you don’t get running water nor sewers (which probably saved that old house) and it’s not right next to a lake, but there’s some yard to get your hands dirty and some peace and quiet.

    They live in a city on a 5th floor rental apartment, so for them it’s a pretty nice option. Meanwhile I have a house on the countryside already and if I had a cottage it would just mean another property to maintain, so even if I had the money I’m not interested. Being on cottage by the lake is really nice way to spend your time, but as with many things, it’s better to have a friend who owns a cottage than have one by yourself.


  • Immich itself is running on docker, so it’s the same than every other setup. For me it just makes more sense to run that on a separate VM than keeping all the docker containers in a same operating system due to backups, manageability, access control and so on, even if it costs a bit of memory to run a full operating system. Biggest consumers on the host process list are immich-api, postgres-processes and immich. Actual used memory is around 2,5GB for the whole system with ~5GB on buffers/cache.

    But I often import hundreds of raw photos at a time from DSLR and/or 4K video footage from my drone and processing those takes quite a lot of memory. With less memory and slower drives the whole thing crashed when importing bigger batches to out of memory erros, but I suppose it could run just fine with even less than 4GB of memory, if the usage pattern is just to upload photos from your cellphone in a relatively slow pace.


  • It’s a full VM, so OS and docker creates some overhead, but before I upgraded the server it ran on far less resources and specially big imports were painfully slow. Also that’s just the number from proxmox console, so there’s likely some cache included, but stats show that the VM pulls over 10G every now and then with shorter spikes over 20GB of consumed RAM.

    As I mentioned, it can run on way less, but it feels a lot more responsive when it has enough resources.