Highly niche requirements not serviced by available hardware without costing waaaay too much. For example, we’re currently using Cisco Meraki MX85, and even they’re not quite there.
neidu4
Right now I’m using a Fortigate 101E, but eons back I used a simple PC built as cheaply as possible, installed Linux, ip_forward = 1, and iptables.
I am, however, tempted to build something semi-professional based on a banana pi, as I need something custom for work.
Around 700W on low load, almost idle. Haven’t had the chance to test it at full load yet.
It sits in my basement, so the waste heat is actually useful this time of year. Even more so when my basement would otherwise be freezing.
I plan on implementing scheduling where the two most power hungry servers are powered down and up as needed. The other two take almost nothing.
Also, the UPS supports a green mode that is a lot more efficient but with a downside of output side dropping out a few ms during switchover. This removes any conversion loss. I haven’t tested whether my hardware can tolerate it yet, so for now I’m living with the conversion loss.
My house is powered by cheap hydroelectric supply, generated in a mountain roughly 5km from my house, so I’m not worried.
I’m not opposed to blowing up data centers in general, just saying…
Sounds like something shoutcast can do.
Remember the time before apple acted as if they invented audio streaming and built a walled garden of podcasts? We had shoutcasts long before podcasts.
Note to self: Get around to wiring my UPS onto my management network for monitoring and graceful shutdown of non-essential stuff.
When I need to run something that I can’t or won’t run at home, I usually spin up a machine at Hetzner. Cheap, reliable, and setup is fast. The server auction can give you a pretty nice hardware stack at a low cost, and you can cancel at any time.
However, the cases were I use hosting providers are becoming fewer and fewer, as I’m in the final stages of rebuilding my “homelab” the way I want it. If only those UPS batteries could arrive soon…
Anything made to be run from battery can work fine without one. Worst case scenario requires you to spoof some I²C communication to properly emulate a battery, but most devices and batteries are far dumber than that. DC is DC, and sometimes you just need to graft something on top for the other pins.
Source: My old laptops charging circuit failed, so I soldered the charger onto the battery pins instead. Then I replaced the actual battery with an Adafruit Itsybitsy 32u4 (because that what I happened to have available) that emulated the battery status of “Charging, nothing to see here, move along” and sent it via I²C
- No
- Manual only
- Because I’m old and crusty, and always rawdogged service setups. I’m sure containers are nice and all, I just never got around to learning them properly.