I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.
Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?
You must log in or register to comment.
I leave my servers running 24/7, thats the point of a server. Also my home automation would be a little pointless if its off.
I did have a UPS, but it died and I have got round to replacing it.
Its all horses for courses, if your homelab is a playground to test things out then turning it off when not is use is fine. But some have live services that you may want at a moments notice and there for having it up all the time is better.
I’m in the same boat as you. My server runs 24/7, because I have some services that require close to 100% uptime to function correctly.
My UPS works fine though, and I wouldn’t go without it these days. Just because the damage an improper shutdown can cause on data.
There’s a poweroff?!
Im pretty sure OP is just yanking our chain.
And ruin my uptime stats? Are you mad?!?!
Among the many things I run are my own email servers so, yeah gotta be up all the time. And yes I have a UPS behind every electronic device in my house except the TV because if that dies I get to buy a new one.
I’ve probably spent upwards of $2000 on UPSes and replacement batteries over the last 20 years, but if it saved even one of my servers from taking a hit it was worth it. Servers are expensive and my time is valuable to me.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/705/
My home server does all my network related stuff (including DNS and DHCP) turning it off would be a very bad idea due to this.
I don’t have a UPS, but it is relatively high on my list.
It all depends if you actually nerd those services 24/7
I dont need DHCP or DNS from 1am to 6am for example
“Do I need them? No, but I nerd them, so they stay up!”
A most relevant typo 👍
need them
LOL I do nerd em all as well
You may not but your phone will fail over to data if it loses its lease and stuff like background update tasks will cease to function (like Windows Update or dnf cron)
I moved my DNS to a pair of raspberry Pi 3’s running bind, with a DNS stub zone for my homelab domain that points to my homelab DNS servers.
That way the internet keeps working whether my homelab works or not. Keeps the wife aggro down.
You can do whatever you want. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “wrong”. A big part of homelabbing is to try stuff. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine, you learned something, and that was the point.
For me, I don’t see a UPS as essential. It’s generally a good idea, but not strictly essential. My servers are on 24/7, because I have services that do things overnight for me. I also know that some people access my lab when I’m not awake, so I just leave it on so it can be ready for anything at any time. It poses some unique challenges sometimes when running stuff that’s basically 24/7/365.
Be safe, have fun, learn stuff.
I have a ‘dumb’ UPS for my synology NAS to protect against short power outages - it’s done after a minute or 10 though so if I’m not at home it’ll crash anyway. In Retrospect I should’ve gone for a smart one that will shutdown the NAS.
24/7 of course, that’s the point of it. But I have solar, so I don’t mind consuming power, and its not thatuxh a yway, so, anyway…
What’s the point in turning it off at all???
Saving power of course.
Reducing noise and temps is another.
I have solar, so the power consumption is negligible, I am already mostly selling yo the network and not “consuming” most of the days. Also, the server stuff sits in a sound proofed and ventilated compartment in the most remote area of the house.
20 years of planning ahahahahah
Past the times when it was sitting in my bedroom.
I just said what the general benefits are since you apparently were unable to get that yourself.
I’m not saying you specifically should do or not do something, I don’t care.
Could be that it is hosting services that are only actively used instead of passively doing stuff, so no real need to have the server on when you’re sleeping. For me turning it off and on again would be more of a hassle than it’s worth it.
Agreed. First of all that would make running backups more complex, and would require either manual interaction, or very careful automation of some kind.
And any public facing service (like blog and some stuff) would still need to be accessible somehow, so…
My servers are on 24/7, currently they use about 100watts each (I have 2 running), which adds maybe $20 to my electric bill. I also have stuff such as mailcow, nextcloud, and mattermost running, turning off every night would make those applications useless.
I have a shit APC desktop UPS. It keeps them on for 10-15 minutes at best.
Imo you probably save more money keeping the server up 24/7 than constantly shutting it down and starting it up again. Especially once you get a good list of services going.
No one should be powering off their servers. Thats really not the way to go about anything. Now there’s nothing stopping you from doing that either if you want to and it makes you happy or your life easier.
But if you want a simple answer to a simple question, no, nobody sane is doing that lol
We power off servers in the enterprise all the time and on schedules 😂. Its called saving money.
Uh, in your “enterprise” maybe lol.
In pretty much any enterprise using the public cloud. Everything is auto scaling, so shutdowns when not needed. Dev environments shutdown over night… If you’re not shutting down and scaling in the public cloud, you’re doing it wrong.
Ok scaling is not what we’re talking about here lol.
Is it shutting down servers… Yes. it just does it based on parameters and thresholds.
Then you get things like VDI servers and jump boxes that only need to be on between certain hours, so get shutdown outside them hours.
No Donny it’s not. You’re out of your element here.
They’re fuckin’ nihilists dude, they don’t believe in anything
But it is. They’re stopped and deallocated. They start up when demanded. And shutdown when below a threshold or a certain schedule.
Right you don’t shut them down, you scale them down. My server also uses less power off peak demand.
No we shut them down. They get deallocated the same way as shutting down a virtual server does. They’re not containers, the scaling part just turns them on and off based on workload or schedule
Most of us don’t have clusters so shutting down the server means taking the server and all associated services completely offline.
Do you take your product completely offline for 8 hours every single day?
I see where your head is at here, but it sounds like you’re focusing on containerized items. A lot of people are going to look at you real weird if you think of scaling down a container as equivalent to shutting down a server. We can all see where your mind is going and there is logic there, but it’s more akin to closing chrome when you’re not using it than it is to shutting down the computer running chrome.
Even physical hardware, if your paying power you can have clusters of physical hardware power up and down based on usage. There is no point in having 10 physical hosts running when the workload for n+1 means 3 servers overnight. With bnc, ipmi, ilo, idrac it will power them up as needed.
Finally someone who gets it.
Yup. I run those kind of clusters. But unless your in home datacenter territory, that sort of config isn’t likely to happen in self hosted.
Nope always on. Also runs homeaasiatant so if it was off I would lose the schedule use for lights, or phone connection for on/off etc. But yes, get a UPS, even ifvyou haven’t had a power faikure a good UPS will monitor and correct voltage amd dirty power. It has saved me a couple of times.
24/7 I have home assistant and other things that depend on it being up. It’s not a beast but it definitely uses less than my oven. My electric use is big already from my electric car so the small savings wouldn’t be noticeable alongside my solar panels.
Is it controversial because of the fact that “power off” is two words?
Yes, because the CLI command is
poweroff, so I do agree with you 🙂(Please Wait… comments about alternative CLI commands will arrive soon…)
It is “systemctl poweroff” nowadays you fool 😜
That’s an odd way of pronouncing
sudo telinit 0
I have low power usage stuff so I just leave it on.
No. Yes. Kind of.
My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it’s jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.
Server is on 24/7 and it has a UPS for the momentary brown outs I have during heavy winds. It would be silly if it’s off for any reason besides maintenance, even more so since it holds multiple game worlds in addition to some web and chat stuff.
Entirely depends on the usecase. If it’s a NAS and you only watch a few movies in the evening: Turn it off.
I bult a fairly power-efficient server. Consumes less than 20W and spins down the harddisks if not in use.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore, my website would go down, my Fediverse instance wouldn’t pull any posts from American people who are awake during parts of the night. My emails and chat messages wouldn’t get delivered.
I don’t have a UPS. Also depends on the circumstances. I use ext4 as a filesystem which is kind of robust enough to handle power outages. And they’re rare where I live. A UPS would draw additional power and cost money. It’s not worth it for me at home.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore
Personally I try to avoid making anything in my home actually dependant on my server. I have a single lamp that can only be controlled from my phone and that’s only because it’s so rarely used that I didn’t want to put in the effort. Everything else is local first and only gets extended functionality from my server running.
I’ve had a couple issues with my zigbee stuff over the years on the server side and I would be really pissed if I wouldn’t be able to turn my lights on because I haven’t gotten around to fixing my server yet.
Sure. All that stuff has consequences. I also used to run a DNS Adblocker on that machine. So after a power outage, all the lights in the kitchen and livingroom (those are the smart ones) would turn on at full brighness (their default state). The internet wouldn’t ever come back since it’s missing its DNS server. Obviously I can’t get any notification of the incident, since my server is down… And I fall back to being reachable via phone or SMS. If my wife tells me via chat or email… That’s down, too.
I’m still working on a better solution. It ain’t easy, though. It’s certainly easier to use some cloud services and have other people keep the infrastructure running in some datacenters which have more redundancy… We have light switches, though. All my smart home stuff is just retrofitted. So we can still turn it off or on with the wall switches. I won’t change that until I come up with a solution to this problem. Until then, I’ve dialed things a bit back and I refrain from making everything “smart” when I can’t do it 100% reliably.
And it’s just some lights and the washing machine. While I am a nerd and tinkerer, I don’t see any good reason to own a smart toaster, fridge or Alexa. YMMV, of course.
Doesn’t your phone switch back to mobile service if the internet isn’t reachable on your LAN?
yes, the phone switches to mobile. It’s just all the selfhosted services that are missing, like my nextcloud, matrix chat, etc. And several apps complaining they can’t sync anymore or send messages. I don’t use that many cloud services, so it’ll be a lot of things I rely on. Browsing the web works. But I’ve changed things and moved the adblocker. So now that one issue is gone. It still doesn’t solve the real issue… But at least the wifi comes back on its own.
Do you selfhost email too?
Currently yes. I have a bit of a non-standard setup though. Like a business contract with my internet service provider, which includes a few perks that are required to send mail and are missing on a normal residential internet connection (static ip, dns reverse pointer). And generally 95% of people recommend not to do email yourself. I might change in the future. Back in the days it was a few bucks more a month, but they increased prices substantially. Either I move my mailserver to a VPS or save me some time and effort and switch to some email service like everyone else.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore
If you have Hue bulbs, you can buy little radios that attach to your light switch (or replacement light switches) that will still operate your lights when the server is down or the network is unavailable. It’s a worthwhile upgrade.
