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Comment by fanatic2pope | Hacker News Reader

I have a home server that is on 24x7 protected by a UPS. The UPS monitoring daemon (nut) provides a hook for calling a script when its status changes, so I have it push a high priority notification to my phone via ntfy whenever it goes on battery or off battery. I also have it broadcast on mqtt so that in the future I can have a dedicated daemon that will collect stats and take other actions that aren't really appropriate for a hook script.

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How hilariously complicated.

Make UPS data available over SNMP, track via MRTG. A simple, decidedly 1990s solution that unsurprisingly still works. Pretty graphs and everything.

Complicated? It's a 10 line shell script and a single configuration item in the nut config.

> I also have it broadcast on mqtt so that in the future I can have a dedicated daemon that will collect stat

mqtt? How many Docker containers do you have running to track UPS voltage?

I keep forgetting SNMP is not "web scale" and only for greybeards on a minimum of 3+ prescription medications.

LOL, docker for running mosquitto at home? Who does that?

Are you recommending that I run mosquitto directly on my Unraid server rather than Docker?

Just to re-iterate, Unraid is a proprietary Linux OS based on Slackware Linux. It is generally ill-advised to ever run tooling directly on Unraid when a Dockerized equivalent is available.

I did.

It was convenient. The official docker image includes all the tools you need.

Overkill? Sure. It sips memory and compute, but when most everything else is in docker, what is wrong with one more container.

I did a write-up here:

https://github.com/NortySpock/selfhosted-show-wiki/blob/bca6...

(Eventually I did switch over to NATS emulating an MQTT endpoint so I could get a broker with Prometheus-scrapeable `/metrics` endpoint )

Docker is effectively just a packaging format on Linux - it's not a VM (unlike on Windows/Mac where running Docker involves running a hidden Linux VM on which containers are scheduled). So I don't see why you wouldn't use it if it makes things easier (like not having to worry about distro specifics, since there is generally one canonical Docker image for major pieces of software)?

The way you wrote this and your previous comment above led me to believe your account is new. I checked it, 74 days at time of writing. I get the impression you haven't read the guidelines here. I like this place as it is generally civil discourse and have no qualms being the person that points you to the "In Comments" section of the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be kind, rewind.

What a use of electricity. I just go out to my power meter with a pencil and pad and note the number.

How does ntfy compares to Pushover?

I don't know, I've never used pushover. A quick look at their home page doesn't seem to indicate the option of self hosting on a VPS, so that precludes it for me. Otherwise from the code samples provided, it looks quite similar.

Disclaimer: I am the ntfy maintainer. Pleasantly surprised to be mentioned, hehe.

Pushover is an amazing tool and works well. In my obviously biased opinion though, I think that ntfy has a ton more features than Pushover and is fully open source. You can self host all aspects of it or you can use the hosted version on ntfy.sh for free, without signups, or pay for higher limits.

I suggest you try out ntfy;-)

I use ntfy for a whole bunch of personal projects. THANK YOU for keeping this service up and running.

I love hearing that. Anything worth sharing? I love hearing how people use it. My favorite one is the guy protecting his apple tree from thieves by adding a camera and motion sensor and then sending himself a notification with the picture to catch the apple thief.

I have a few things. One is home security, I get basic notifications when something is in the driveway. I'm working on getting Frigate running to hopefully give me the names or license plates of people when they arrive.

I also have one tied to a manufacturing database at my company. When a batch of products rolls off the line I get an updated count of units made. Kind of a way to know production systems are running and there are no problems at the work cells.

I also made a rickety-ass system that scrapes the local commuter rail API and fires off a notification when one of my trains is late or cancelled. That's been pretty helpful. The rail company has a Twitter account, but I don't go there anymore. So I rolled my own.

ntfy makes this all incredibly easy. I love it.

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