While I appreciate the sentiment, most traditional VMs do not like to have their power killed (especially non-journaling file systems).
Even crash consistent applications can be impacted if the underlying host fs is affected by power loss.
I do think that backup are a valid suggestion here, provided that the backup is an interrupted by a power surge or loss.
I agree that 99.999% uptime is a pipedream for most home labs, but I personally think a UPS is worth it, if only to give yourself the option to gracefully shut down systems in the event of a power outage.
Eventually, I’ll get a working script that checks the battery backup for mains power loss and handle the graceful shutdown for me, but right now that extra 10-15 minutes of battery backup is enough for a manual effort.
This is why I have about five of these bad boys: CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD.
One is in my utility room for my cable modem and our chest freezer, three back up my homelab and wifi AP, and one is for my office.
They’ve been bulletproof through storms, and when we’ve lost power, but not Internet I can’t keep on working.
The big thing to look for is number of battery+surge outlets vs just surge outlets. Typically they top out at 1500VA - the more overhead for what you’re powering, the longer you can go without mains power.
A screen/display is helpful for at-a-glance information like expected runtime, current output, etc.
This is the right answer. I have dockerized Calibre and Calibre-Web for initial intake, then use Calibre-Web’s OPDS feed with my Moon+ Android app for reading on my tablet/phone.
Calibre handles type conversions, metadata sync, and file organization.
Calibre-Web works well for browser reading on my PC.
Adding to this - I have those adapters to, ans fyi they don’t support jumbo frames.
I’ve switched over to using a publicly resolvable domain name, but with a lan prefix (e.g. lan.mystuff.dev) so that I can do DNS challenge let’s encrypt certs.
Paired with PowerDNS that acts as an authority for the lan.mystuff.dev domain, I can go to a legit certificate/SSL protected https://sonarr.lan.mystuff.dev url. If I wanted to, I could add cloudflare records for the same services exposed through my router (Like for vpn.lan.mystuff.dev) so that both internal and external resolution is possible.
It really depends on what you want to run. I have a clusterHat (four Pi Zeros on a Pi4) that runs a Hashicorp Vault cluster with minimal usage.
The big thing about self hosting is what happens if you (or other people) start to depend on your service - what do you do about hardware failures? Maintenance windows for patching?
To start off, a Pi is fine, but you’ll probably start maxing out your compute and memory (again, depending on workload).
Dropbox keeps hounding me to upgrade to a paid level - back when they were incentivizing sign-ups with free storage for the inviter and invitee, I spin up several throwaway accounts and VMs to give myself bonus storage (I’m just over 21GB).
It’s plenty for some critical secondary backups of wedding photos, docs, and an encrypted volume or two - but I absolutely cannot see myself paying for even their cheapest tier.
I didn’t intend to use it on the chest freezer - it was mostly for the modem, but since I had spare battery capacity and outlets I thought what the heck.
The power load is practically nothing until it cycles, and even then it’s fairly efficient - my current runtime is estimated to be about 18 hours, more than enough to come up with an alternative if we lose power in a storm.