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My Overkill Home Network

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Re: My Overkill Home Network

#281

Post by antoinec »

uoaei wrote: post #276
antoinec wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like he is powering at least part of his installation through solar: https://blog.networkprofile.org/17kw-enphase-solar-install/

What is the CO2e ROI on producing and installing solar, including all the transportation and installation equipment being used? When is it net-negative compared to pulling energy from the grid?

Good question, not sure how I would know the answer though. You probably should ask the guy. Given how he seems to track everything, I wouldn't be surprised if he came up with a way of measuring that as well.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#282

Post by Emjayen »

bmitc wrote: post #58

Is there a post that covers the "why?" of all this? As someone researching maybe running some Ethernet for more stable WiFi and faster Internet access for general stuff, maybe some fiber for infotainment other purposes since it can lengthen various cables, and hooking up some security and nature cameras, I can't fathom why all of this is needed outside of it just being a hobby or running some sort of business (tradin…

Although not as elaborate as this, I have what one would call a "homelab" and it's for, well, testing and experimenting -- I write a lot of high-performance server/network-centric software (e.g, saturating a 100G link with 64B frames is a common test) and virtual machines just aren't suitable/capable most of the time.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#283

Post by wasksrhh »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #274

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 i…

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)

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#284

Post by ivolimmen »

Borg3 wrote: post #273
cjdell wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have mixed feelings. I stopped home labing because of the energy costs. I now have everything I need (HomeAssistant / NAS / Router) running on an old Dell Precision laptop. Laptops make great servers because they are optimised for low power consumption + you get a free console and UPS built-in! I'm tempted by the new Alder Lake N100 mini PCs that are available on Chinese websites. But I need to wait until the…

Laptops are great servers? Hmm I beg to differ. They are very compressed, so they heat up a lot. 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.

I run a server at home. It's a PINE64... uses 10w or something. My NAS uses more but I only turn that one when I need to backup stuff.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#285

Post by tosie »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #259

I wish every apartment would have at least some units of at least half-depth of rack space. Fitting anything (even a basic setup of a PaspberryPi + the PON modem + a minuscule switch + a PoE inhector) into the tiny space behind hatch where the cables from all the wall sockets end in my condo apartment is extremely hard. And I am still looking for a 5-port switch which would be manageable, support vlans, handle gigabi…

When powered adequately, the Ubiquiti Flex (USW-Flex) [1] might fit your needs.

[1] https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/collections/unifi-switching-ut...

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#286

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #267
ivolimmen wrote: post #227

I find this really disturbing. On the one hand this looks really nerdy and cool but then I see the immense amount of hardware that also relies on power... so much power. This is completely unnecessary but then I also see the pictures of an F150.. so yeah it makes sense. I have to categorize this as a (un)typical American person that does not care about the environment. Do like the fact that he runs a RIPE probe thoug…

I dunno, a lot of people on here use more power without noticing it, because it's on whatever cloud provider they use. Every time I push some commits, an array of servers spins up in an AWS datacenter somewhere to run all of my verifications and do a build. 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.…

> I dunno, a lot of people on here use more power without noticing it, because it's on whatever cloud provider they use. Every time I push some commits, an array of servers spins up in an AWS datacenter somewhere to run all of my verifications and do a build.

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.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#287

Post by alex3305 »

SanderNL wrote: post #247
ivolimmen wrote: post #227

I find this really disturbing. On the one hand this looks really nerdy and cool but then I see the immense amount of hardware that also relies on power... so much power. This is completely unnecessary but then I also see the pictures of an F150.. so yeah it makes sense. I have to categorize this as a (un)typical American person that does not care about the environment. Do like the fact that he runs a RIPE probe thoug…

I find it very interesting how awareness of climate change (and let’s not forget: the price of energy) has had so much impact on my and others’ judgement in a relatively short time. 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 tellin…

> 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?

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.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXd-aP06lug&t=45s

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#288

Post by Karrot_Kream »

trustingtrust wrote: post #212

Biggest problems I have faced for home networks : ISPs are poorly configured and do very shady things sometimes like DNS hijacking. More often than not poor ONU firmware or hardware means you will see weird things like latency spikes or straight up packet drops. Sometimes IPv6 won't work if the ONU is in bridge mode etc. etc. This post is overkill but what mostly works for home networks: SQM - like cake sqm in openwr…

Why would you use a local DNS resolver instead of using a remote well-known resolver like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 in a home networking situation? Your systems will cache DNS entries to paper over unavailability issues, and as long as you use one as your primary and the other as a secondary, there's a very low likelihood (probably < 0.0001%) that you'll ever have issues resolving DNS.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#289

Post by edent »

Can someone explain what the multiple GPS receivers are for?

I get using one for NTP.

I guess a second for redundancy even though it is picking up the same satellites as the first.

And the rest?

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#290

Post by znpy »

edent wrote: post #289

Can someone explain what the multiple GPS receivers are for? I get using one for NTP. I guess a second for redundancy even though it is picking up the same satellites as the first. And the rest?

Overkill… as the author says in the title.
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