Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

I used to have an overkill home network, complete with self hosting everything and 10G backbone.

These days i'm more pragmatic. I have exactly 2 wired machines, and everything else runs Wifi. The network "rack" is simply a firewall and a 16 port POE switch, everything else network related has been retired to the closet.

My NAS is gone. With electricity frequently going above €1/kWh last winter, it seemed like a bad idea to have a NAS sitting there, consuming ~35 kWh/month. Instead i spent about €20/month on cloud storage, and simply upload everything to the cloud (encrypted with Cryptomator), and i have redundant cloud storage (different provider) included in the cost which is where my backup goes.

All that's left at home is a small ARM based machine that handles making daily backups of my cloud data locally, as well as run a small Plex library on a single USB3 external drive.

Besides saving about half my previous electricity cost (as well as all the hardware cost!), i have gained SO MUCH spare time. My firewall is completely closed (save a wireguard VPN), and i no longer have to maintain anything except the normal patch routines.

Amen to this.

I moved house recently and the only things I did were running CAT6 from where the internet enters the house, up to a PoE switch in the loft that then has a few Wifi6 APs connected to that.

Everything is wifi (all cameras, smart switches etc, office laptop, a single RPi4 for "projects" and so on) and all seems fine. The only device that is directly connected via ethernet is a headless gaming desktop that lives in the loft that I occasionally use for streaming games to a laptop.

But kudos for this guy if that is what he wants to do. Personally I did not enjoy doing the cable runs (especially for external-grade CAT6).

My cameras are still POE (UniFi Protect), but i had already run the cables for it, so not much point i replacing them just for the sake of moving to WiFi.

My "server" is also wired, as is my Hue Bridge, Tado Bridge and other "IoT" devices that doesn't support wifi, but when it comes to user accessible machines there is exactly one, which is my "go to" machine in case the router/switch dies and i can't get on the WiFi.

How are you liking Unifi Protect?

For what i use it for, it does it's job well.

I also run a HomeBridge to bridge protect to Apple HomeKit, to have a backup of the footage.

> The only device that is directly connected via ethernet is a headless gaming desktop that lives in the loft that I occasionally use for streaming games to a laptop.

Really curious how you set this up, sounds like it could be the perfect solution for me.

I went the same way as... honestly, my IT burnout kicked in. I went from an overly complex setup down to... well, a Ruckus AP running as an Unleashed gateway directly hooked to a FiOS ONT, its second port feeding a QNAP.

That's it, the entire network. Just enough storage to enjoy some media, the QNAP runs HomeAssistant (literally just to bridge some stuff to HomeKit) and Tailscale, and that's all I really need.

I recommend you checkout Rclone (https://github.com/rclone/rclone) instead of Cryptomater, much more robust and powerful software. I used to use Cryptomator as well, but after my data exceeded certain size, it became slow and difficult to operate. Plus, once I went to pull my data out of it, I realised that it had reset file metadata on all my files (I didn't know what picture was taken when anymore, for example)

I do use Rclone as well, but Cryptomator has one feature that rclone does not, it allows me to access my data "on the go" from my phone.

Personally i have never experienced any of the issues you mention, but my Cryptomator vaults are also mostly below 1TB in size.

If you are using android there is RCX (https://github.com/x0b/rcx) as a frontend to rclone. Rclone can also be used in termux. Not sure about apple.

Looks good but the last update was in 2021. Is this still being worked on?

Round Sync is a currently active fork. Updates are infrequent, but there was one last week that fixed the (experimental) SAF support and updated rclone, asking other things.

https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync

I still have my local NAS and will in fact be upgrading it sometime this or next year. I don't trust cloud computing with my data, even tough I'd rather forgo the complexity and electricity cost.

But that's my price of freedom.

> My NAS … consuming ~35 kWh/month

Translates to 50W.

Thank you. I spent a good few moments trying to wrap my head around this measurement.

Honestly, I thought it made more sense to measure it that way if you're trying to work out the electricity bill.

I intentionally wrote the consumption in kWh instead of just Watts.

Watts is the energy consumed "right now" (which is the product of Volt x Amps), but needs a time dimension to give a measure of historical consumption, which is where the Watt Hour (Wh) comes into play.

While most people are aware that X consumes Y Watts, few consider how much that addes up to over the course of days or weeks.

Few people are aware that a simple ethernet switch will roughly consume 1W per plugged in port, so an 8 port switch might consume 8-16W of power just sitting there, so 4-9 kWh/month.

My old homelab used to consume around 300W when idle, meaning it was consuming 300 * 24 * 30.5 = 219 kWh/month, and with electricity prices reaching €1/kWh, that suddenly becomes A LOT of money to have a Plex server available 24/7.

Ugh. Agree with this.

My Synology NAS was failing. Saw that as a great opportunity to set up a proxmox box on a reasonably powerful used HP SFF, run TrueNAS on it. Plenty of time to get proxmox, TrueNAS, Gitea, a docker host, … just right.

It’s sat there with 4/16TB used, no real data transfer apart from TimeMachine from my Mac and my git server, sucking power at European rates.

Wish I hadn’t bothered, and had just gone with another Synology.

> It’s sat there with 4/16TB used, no real data transfer apart from TimeMachine from my Mac and my git server, sucking power at European rates

I have a similar setup with SFF running backups & ProxMox. However, I have smart plugs for my SFF and have a script to turn it on/off using cron (or on demand) from an always-on Pi. Wake on LAN would have worked too.

I'm considering making my Raspberry Pi the gateway proxy/"Load Balancer" to the SFF; turning it on if needed. It's trivial to proxy HTTP (Pi works as a Caddy-based proxy with long timeouts, powers on SFF in background if off. Things got trickier for proxying NFS & iSCSI)

This is a genius idea. I may try similar.

The box is on another routed subnet - I wonder if I could firewall rule a “start” trigger.

I think a NAS is fine when you lock it down to sleep when it's not being used. Sure, means you have to wait for it to wake up every time you want to use it, but I mostly use mine (a 4 bay Synology) to back up photos (raws) from a camera so I only need access sparingly.

Could you share how you set up the cloud backup? Also, what cloud providers you use

My cloud backup is rather simple, i use Arq backup with Family365. Fits nicely that each user has 1TB space in their personal OneDrive, and nobody here uses OneDrive.

My local backup is also done with Arq backup to a local USB drive, though i have a long time test running with Kopia backing up to Minio on a Raspberry Pi.

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