Do like the fact that he runs a RIPE probe though.
Some people fly to Africa and shoot elephants for fun - as far as hobbies go, this is fairly benign. If you care about the environment, I mean actually care, then you should recognize that policing how many computers someone have in their closet is counterproductive. I don't buy the "every little bit helps" argument because there is always an opportunity cost. Attention spans are limited and focusing on this non-issue does nothing but draw attention away from things that actually matter like meat consumption and fossil fuels.
We really need to stop demonising the use of energy. Energy is amazing. It is the reason we have seen to much prosperity in so little time. It's the backbone of our economies. Of medicine and the internet and EVs and well insulated homes. We should be doing everything we can to make energy cheaper, enabling more people to use more energy. Few things have been as damaging for climate activism than the war on energy. It's unnecessary and misses the point of the entire movement: saving the environment. Focus on cleaner sources of energy rather than demonising people using energy.
Like me.
Source: https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/state-electricity-g...
I'm tempted by the new Alder Lake N100 mini PCs that are available on Chinese websites. But I need to wait until the laptop dies before I can justify it. It's not just about power consumption but the (hidden) cost of manufacturing. Make use of the stuff you already have before buying new stuff.
At least he had a big solar array...
You need low power server? Go for Atom like CPU with good case. My home server running D2550 and 2x 1TB HDD is less than 40W. PSU is cold.
You do have a point in that certain devices can suffer from overcharging and bulging batteries. This issue is largely addressed in newer devices. I can see that the BMS in my laptop server is holding at 90% charge. Definitely worth checking if you plan to use an old phone/laptop/tablet as a 24/7 device.
> Make use of the stuff you already have before buying new stuff.
this is the way!
if you need a heavy duty machine, use it, but most of the time you don't, that's the point.
(for comparison; skylake laptop uses about 20W under max load, my 12-gen desktop uses 40W while idle)
> Who are you to decide if it is necessary or not? > Why are you justified in negatively stereotyping AmericansThe people who complained about those issues thought they were “on the right side” as well.
But in the end it’s all just busybodies trying to force other to live their life the way they think it should be lived.
Do you disagree that humans need to minimise waste in order to fight climate change?
Allow me to respond with a slight tangent:
Suppose you care about reducing plastic in the ocean. So you try to reduce your usage of plastic straws. You spend a whole lot of time convincing everyone you know to buy bamboo straws or such.
Plastic straws make up less than 0.1% of the plastic in the ocean. Meanwhile, fishing nets make up ~40%. Plastic straws are a hard problem to solve, and solving them accomplishes less than 1/400th of the fishing net problem.
And yet, we hear a lot about plastic straws but nothing about fishing nets. Why?
Because it's the more consumer-facing solution. It's vital that people focus on the solution that solves the problem, rather than wthe one that is most easily pointed to.
Should we do both? In theory, sure. But in practice people have finite time, and you have 30 seconds max before they start tuning you out, so you're better off giving your elevator pitch on fishing nets.
When is it net-negative compared to pulling energy from the grid?
Why ask something akin to "why does anyone ever even try to audit stuff, tho?" What's with the stark epistemological nihilism?
Why do you even respond if you won't actually address any of the questions? How is that not exactly the bad faith argument style you imply I make?
I have no doubt we could examine OP’s life and find plenty of “wasteful” use of energy but no doubt OP would say “that’s different”. It’s always “the other guy” in these cases.
Add on top it’s a lazy comment that adds nothing to the conversation.
I've seen stuff that or more vile etc. of course, but as far as sanctimoniousness goes, this is the worst I've seen in my several decades on the internet.
Even many northern US states (around the same Latitude as Madrid, north), on average, are 30-35+ every day during the summer and 0C to -10C in the winter. Many Canadians have air con.
So yes, heating and air con is a requirement in many areas. I live in a northern state, and we regularly have full weeks that are 38-40C.
A part time job of mine is helping a buddy's solar company and right now I'm working on a project, for an older couple who are building a 4200sqft house with 4 mini-splits, 2 electric boilers that switch to gas when it's cold, 3 refrigerators, 2 deep freezes and a potential future electric vehicle. There's a pool too but that changes the dynamics of the system greatly but I don't design and quote that unless they really want to spend $$$.
I'm glad they're deciding to go solar but I see this so often it hurts. An older couple without kids in a giant house in the desert that requires immense heating and cooling wants some solar to help offset their gross over consumption. Rather than scale down to a, still large, 2000sqft high efficiency house they go with cheap construction so they have more than enough space for the one time a year all the family shows up. Oh yah then they fill it with crap that's rarely if ever used.
There's no judgement thrown to the customer as this is the reality of the world we live in, but I see this as seriously problematic. Especially going forward as these older individuals die. Can a family of 4 or 6 afford that place? Do they even want a place so large which requires such an inordinate amount of maintenance? Three 1400sqft high efficiency homes could be built on approximately that same space bringing down the price of the home, reducing maintenance and providing more than one couple space to live.
Sorry, that was more of a rant than anything. Europe is not the promised land but the US really has some screwy priorities when it comes to housing.
Lol, you write that as if the Europeans were consuming half as much because they are morally enlightened.
Europeans use 6Mwh/person because thats as much as their emasculated societies can steal from Africa. May I remind you they didn't leave Africa very willingly in the 50s-70s. But they kept on stealing anyway!
Thats right. Steal. Libya, Algeria, Niger. The French convertible Franc. The French senate bemoaning just this week that Macron "lost" Africa. Lost Africa? Africa is not France's to lose!
Unlike, say, Japan or Korea that have more than just a token few LNG terminals and pay for their gas with monitors and great cars.
Second, this person seems to have a very large house anyway. My house manages with a modem, a wifi router and two IP cameras, but that can just scale up linearly.
When I grow up I want a switch rack like this in a basement or closet, wired network everywhere and PoE security cameras. Bigger house also means I can get an array of solar panels and become net positive.
Most AWS (and generally cloud) instances are already virtualized from bigger machines. Power, heating, and cooling in these large racks is running much more efficiently than running these things in your home on dedicated compute that is only being used for your purposes. Even more efficient is using something like serverless compute or something like Cloudflare workers. While cloud compute probably is not running at low idle power, it's probably maximizing it's power utilization as much as possible.
> Bigger house also means I can get an array of solar panels and become net positive.
There's a lot of hidden costs associated with becoming "net positive", everything from adding more peak load during inclement events to issues associated with grid fragility.
Look I don't think it's good form to roast OP on what's really standard behavior on the internet: showing off your cool digs. But I also think we should be intentional about what it is: showing off your cool digs.
The rest of the services that OP runs I run on a combination of a 12 year old SBC and a Raspberry Pi. Modern computers (read < 15 years old) when used as server appliances are very capable and can packet switch very quickly, even while running a kernel and a usermode. Doubt me? Run your own iperf tests and check where things are bottlenecking.
My IP cameras are all Raspberry Pis that use the camera module and stream using RTSP back to the SBC. Instead of managing VLANs (I do offer a guest VLAN but my partner and friends found it a pain so it doesn't get much use shrug), I run Zerotier through the house. My IP cameras sit on a single Zerotier network. All other services I run internally use Zerotier and if I do accept external traffic, I expose a port on a VPS (like OP) and have some nftables rules which NAT the traffic through Zerotier. I've thought about getting a failover ISP (our area has 2), but our primary ISP offers us fantastic peering (I've exhaustively tested the bandwidth and jitter to the VPS I proxy traffic through) and good enough uptime for me to not bother.
Like a lot of other hobbies, people can get very consumeristic. This is what a consumeristic version of homelabbing looks like. This shouldn't stop you or anyone else from building a humble homelab that can do almost all of what OPs home network does. The key is to test where your network has bottlenecks. I've iperf tested my network exhaustively and frequently look at kernel counters and other things to make sure that my network is performing up to spec, but that's a lot less fun than buying lots of cool networking gear. Much like you don't need an F-150 to get around day-to-day, maybe even just a bike :)
This is also my case. For Internet access, I use a router which has 4 2.5 GbE ports for the internal LAN, which was made several years ago with an Intel NUC and 4 USB Ethernet dongles, but which could be done today with a small and cheap fanless router using an "Alder Lake N" Intel N100 or N200 CPU. There are also such small routers with more 2.5 GbE ports for the internal LAN, e.g. 6 or 8. That router implements a lot of network services, including DNS servers for my domain and my own e-mail server.
I also have 5 servers that are interconnected by a 10 GbE subnetwork, but that is done without external switches. Each server has a dual-port 10 Gb/s NIC and they are interconnected directly, in a ring. The servers are normally powered off. Whenever needed, I power on the first of them through Wake-on-Ethernet. Through it, I can power on, also using Wake-on-Ethernet, as many of the others as needed.
When a part of the servers are powered off, the topology of the subnetwork becomes linear and the throughput becomes limited to 10 Gb/s, but with less active servers the traffic is also less.
Greater performance can be obtained by using two Ethernet cards with dual 10 Gb/s ports in each computer. With 4 ports per computer total interconnection can be achieved up to 5 nodes and above that each node can be connected to two intersecting rings, which is a topology very frequently used in HPC.
An alternative is to use a single card with dual 25 Gb/s ports, per computer. Such cards are not much more expensive than the 10 Gb/s NICs, but the 25 Gb/s switches are very expensive, so a ring topology without switches is even more attractive.
I don't even know why I'm replying to you, but here we go
So I should ditch all this and rely on cloud services I guess. Cloud services are hosted in magic land where they don't use any power, right? If you use any cloud services, you are just as bad as me.
I have 17kw of solar on the roof. As we type this, I'm exporting 10kw of power back to the grid. I generate enough solar to completely cover all of my electricity usage, and during the night when I'm pulling from the grid, my power plan is sourced 100% from wind or solar.
All of this is my hobby, but also helps me learn skills for my job. That job is 100% work from home, which means I don't drive pretty much at all. I'm sorry my F150 offends you, which has less than 10,000 miles on the clock despite being 5 years old. That same F150 also gets better miles per gallon than a lot of regular cars on the road. My wifes Ford Escape (A compact "SUV" if you can call it that" gets worse milage than my truck. But I'm sure if you saw a Ford Escape, you'd be fine with it right?
Where in the post did I say how much power all this uses? You said "power... so much power" yet you don't even know how much power it uses...
I won't even go into detail how I've removed over 1000sqft of concrete on my property, how I've planted an 800sqft native wildflower meadow, have a bat house, use rainwater for plants, etc etc. But no I'm just such a terrible American. Grow up.
Its not quite as green as that right now, since we have a pretty bad drought here in Houston, but it will come back.
I had to make the small fence as it just kept trying to spread out. The fence is made from scrap 2x4's ripped down the middle to make 2x2's, and the rails are old scrap cedar pickets pressure washed and ripped down
This is the seed mix: https://www.dkseeds.com/shop/flkbee-website-king-s-feed-the-...
I'll have to take some pictures of the bat house, maybe I should just make a post on all this, maybe that will please them
It really IS unnecessary, as you can tell by the author of the article referring to their home network as "overkill".
Don't bother appeasing climate hystericals.
And my opinion is that the setup is indeed overkill. The author(s) literally admit so themselves.
The point that this is overkill and power hungry is completely irrelevant. OP's comment is coming from their high horse.
You can't tell from a blog post if what he's doing is good or bad for the environment. And further more, its unfair to tell people that they shouldn't improve their niche skills when those same skills are what they use for employment.
5-10 years ago I would think this is perfectly fine. I believe I was not alone in this, but maybe I was. The energy would have cost pennies too and why whine about it?
Now I think it’s exorbitant as well, for me. The F150 etc, it’s telling a different story now.
I do think it’s kind of below the belt to snipe any single culture for this. It’s too easy to target Americans. I don’t know about this guy’s life. Maybe he has a ranch with 20 square miles of renewables and I don’t care actually. It’s just personal reflection.
When I moved into my own home (8 years ago) I brought my 'homeserver' with me. Which was just a simple i5-2600 build with some shucked drives in it. I never thought about electricity prices when I lived with my parents. But that changed rather fast. With the server gobbling up a constant 90W, I quickly realized that, even back than, it would cost me 15 euro's a month on electricity alone.
I than proceeded to put a Pi next to it, that would listen to incoming Plex requests and would start up and shut down the server with WoL. That only reduced costs by about a third. The next couple of years I would move on to a NUC with a NAS that would only consume about 29W/h on average. Which was decent, but not great considering the poor performance of both machines (J4105 and J1800).
Last month I have gone back to the DIY route. Now with a i5-13500. I'm still in the process of optimizing it for power efficiency. Although much more stressful than the prebuilts, I love the hunt for the last watt.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I notice that family and friends don't really care about saving power in general. They mostly just pay for it and there's that. While my house runs 100% on electricity and I'm really proud if I can get 9kWh/day on average. Even when I see that (for example) the 8-bit guy uses 100kWh/day on average [1]. Which seems out of this world for me.
I'm environmentally conscious (0 cars, 0 pets) but I haven't spent any time measuring and optimising electricity usage.
I've had a look at my own electricity usage every once in a while, now averaging 48 kWh/month (between 38 and 68) for a larger than average apartment for two people.
How hard is this to configure? I have a server at home I use to run a database and computational heavy code, however I am the only user so realistically it is only in use 8 hours a day and some weekends etc. However in the fear of forgetting to turn it on before I go to work (or if I suddenly find time to work while away) I find that I default to leave it on. Being able to control it would be fantastic.
You can make it simpler to use by making an alias in your shell, or a button on your phone (with one of the countless "ssh button" apps). Or even make a web page for it (some php or python that just calls the WoL function).
OP describes a more transparent (and complex) setup where the Pi presumably acts as a reverse proxy. I'd be curious to know the exact setup too, one of the simplest ways would be to use wake on unicast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35627107
Other ways include wrapping some scripts around socat, writing your own proxy, systemd socket activation, etc.
A reverse proxy would of probably worked too, but I didn't want to be limited by the 100Mbps network interface of my Pi 3B.
1. https://gist.github.com/alex3305/8cc73ddd2c8ca6328f20235480a...
Not at all. Just ensure that you have WoL enabled on the host machine and than proceed to send a magic packet. You could even do this with Home Assistant [1] if you are into that. I did this with a script that used tcpdump to monitor for incoming traffic [2] for Plex with an additional (dummy) Plex server on the Pi. I also remember faintly that I had to add 1 library and 1 video file to make this work though.
Powering down - or sleep - is a bit harder. I built a 'Sleep on LAN' app [3] for myself years ago that could power down (or sleep) a system on demand using a REST API. I used this and Tautulli [3] with Home Assistant that would check if there were any active streams and if there wasn't any activity for a specified amount of time I would send a SoL request to my service.
As you can see it isn't super hard or complicated, but a bit cumbersome to find all the moving bits and make it work. But when it does, it's IMHO fantastic.
1. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wake_on_lan/
2. https://gist.github.com/alex3305/8cc73ddd2c8ca6328f20235480a...
Currently having a house remodeled, which I'm putting as much solar (and battery) on as possible, and the gas is being removed entirely. Going to try not to use more than the system can generate, though I am not sure I'll be successful.
Holier-than-thou much?
city dwellers not so much
i'd like that number put into perspective, but it does not feel like on the low end.
> Yet the most popular vehicle for the past few years has been the ford F150. It's not being bought by rural or working class people, it's a luxury status symbol now.
thanks for the insight! but i struggle with the combination of "most popular" and "luxury status symbol"
Sometimes people who live in urban areas like to pretend that no one lives outside of cities except cows and guns. 20% is still quite a few people at about 60 million. Not a exactly a rounding error.
My childhood in NZ was like, medium sized perfectly reasonable Japanese cars on the road, some small-ish (by American standards) utes where people needed to haul a month's worth of groceries back to the farm. Now everyone & their Mum is driving an SUV in the UK (where I'm living now) and this is made even more obscene by the narrow, historic roads here.
And you look at the inside of these plush, rounded range rovers designed not for crawling up a mountain but the urban commute and if you're lucky enough to spot one not being driven by a single occupant (also common), expecting ridiculous cargo and passenger space and...no, they've just somehow managed to fill the space with more nothing. 2-2.5 tonnes of nothing. A >3L engine to move your nothing around.
Even American friends of mine here agree & laugh at "oh v6/v8 is common and they're 3-7L and yet aren't really that efficient at making power".
I get it, it looks cool and damn fun. I dream of this kinds of setup. but brushing off the environmental impact is also wrong.
Now admittedly, he is but a drop in vast ocean when it come to pollution and waste, and there is definitely far worse offender. But keeping our environmental impact in mind should be a necessity in this era.
Individual accountability is important, but self-flagellation or (vicarious) shame because forces bigger than us are causing problems is a waste of energy (ha!).
It's similar to when there's hypocrisy charges levied against "champagne socialists." Nice virtue signalling for worker's rights for someone with a 6 figure income... meanwhile that 6 figure salary accounts for 0.01% the net worth of a billionaire.
Go for the high stakes first, then we can worry about homelabs pulling more power than they should.