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We are now Solar Powered

andrewjvpowell.com

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#21
> …bit of reverse proxying with Nginx is needed also…

Nginx reverse proxy has capability of caching static assets, does it mean most of the website is actually being served by cloud? So, technically raspberry pie should be consuming power only when cache timesout.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#22
post #17
post #16

> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently…

Carrier-imposed NAT is a horrible thing, and it isn't clear to me why connections can't be given _at least_ a publicly accessible IPv6 address.

Can confirm that it's truly horrendous.

Since switching to that grade of service I have consistently had captcha challenges every time I go through paypal (despite it saying 'we recognise you on this device...'), my Unifi VPN fails to work, despite following several guides specifically for double NAT (I'll probably end up with wireguard), and most recently my O365 endpoint failed to talk to me, as one of the half-dozen IPv4 addresses they route out of had been marked by Spamhaus.org, which a) is identified a woeful arrangement in itself, and b) took me two days to get rectified by the ISP by switching which address I came out with (a minor change which resulted in a 24 hour total outage).

I did ask about IPv6 - but nothing about that experience screamed 'we're ready to move our customers to IPv6', as you could imagine.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#23

> …bit of reverse proxying with Nginx is needed also… Nginx reverse proxy has capability of caching static assets, does it mean most of the website is actually being served by cloud? So, technically raspberry pie should be consuming power only when cache timesout.

Article author here, your question is actually a really good one as I'm a bit of an Nginx newb and your comment had me wondering that too. However for the past few hours since this article has been shared the hits have gone quite crazy according to the Raspberry Pis access.log, and the Pagekite.py process is constantly around 30-70% CPU usage, implying a heavy load as normally it uses nearly nothing. Does Nginx reverse proxy cache by default? I'm assuming not given my current results.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#24
post #16

> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently…

That IS true about Skymuster Plus. It wasn't true when I first set up this mobile/solar internet solution and back then I had to save every gigabyte; admittedly I forgot to mention that in the article. Still, yeah, not much can be done about the ping. I do have hope for Starlink.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#25

On measuring power and system load to correlate them (something the article mentions) - I would hook the Pi up to something that can measure outlet power consumption and report via USB, and then feed that back into the Pi’s own USB port. Metrics can then be collected and stored, and easily analyzed with eg. grafana. I have such a setup with an old watts up meter, telegraf collecting raw data off a custom script that…

Thank you for this, that's really handy info!

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#26
post #16

> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently…

> I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed…

I think you parsed it correctly - author is saying you can’t get away from 600ms latency and limited bandwidth given where they live.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#27
post #17
post #16

> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently…

Carrier-imposed NAT is a horrible thing, and it isn't clear to me why connections can't be given _at least_ a publicly accessible IPv6 address.

T-Mobile switched from CGNAT to 464XLAT and an IPv6-only network something like 7 years ago

… but I believe they heavily filter the traffic in said IPv6 network, so that the addresses are not reachable

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#28

> …bit of reverse proxying with Nginx is needed also… Nginx reverse proxy has capability of caching static assets, does it mean most of the website is actually being served by cloud? So, technically raspberry pie should be consuming power only when cache timesout.

Article author here, your question is actually a really good one as I'm a bit of an Nginx newb and your comment had me wondering that too. However for the past few hours since this article has been shared the hits have gone quite crazy according to the Raspberry Pis access.log, and the Pagekite.py process is constantly around 30-70% CPU usage, implying a heavy load as normally it uses nearly nothing. Does Nginx rever…

no it wont do that by default, there would be quite some wild assumptions to be made to make it a default for everything. even if cache behavior would be signaled from upstream servers properly.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#29
post #2

What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.

It reminded me of the images on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com

For example https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H...

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#30
post #26
post #16

> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently…

> I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed… I think you parsed it correctly - author is saying you can’t get away from 600ms latency and limited bandwidth given where they live.

Aha, okay, that was my initial reading.

NBN (Australia's national broadband system) introduced, via a partner, this Sky Muster Plus offering about two years ago, that includes effectively unmetered plans, so the claim isn't as true as it used to be.

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