I woke up this morning to a text from my ISP, “There is an outage in your area, we are working to resolve the issue”

I laugh, this is what I live for! Almost all of my services are self hosted, I’m barely going to notice the difference!

Wrong.

When the internet went out, the power also went out for a few seconds. Four small computers host all of my services. Of those, one shutdown, and three rebooted. Of the three that ugly rebooted some services came back online, some didn’t.

30 minutes later, ISP sends out the text that service is back online.

2 hours later I’m still finding down services on my network.

Moral of the story: A UPS has moved to the top of the shopping list! Any suggestions??

  • lemmyvoreEnglish
    39•10 months ago

    IMHO you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. 100% availability is not something that’s attainable for a self-hoster without driving yourself crazy.

    Like the other comment suggested, I’d rather invest time into having machines and services come back up smoothly after reboots.

    That being said, an UPS may be relevant to your setup in other ways. For example it can allow a parity RAID array to shut down cleanly and reduce the risk of write holes. But that’s just one example, and an UPS is just one solution for that (others being ZFS, or non-parity RAID, or SAS/SATA controller cards with built-in battery and/or hardware RAID support etc.)

    • @[email protected]English
      19•10 months ago

      I agree that 99.999% uptime is a pipedream for most home labs, but I personally think a UPS is worth it, if only to give yourself the option to gracefully shut down systems in the event of a power outage.

      Eventually, I’ll get a working script that checks the battery backup for mains power loss and handle the graceful shutdown for me, but right now that extra 10-15 minutes of battery backup is enough for a manual effort.

      • shnizmuffinEnglish
        9•10 months ago

        Some of the nicer models of UPS have little servers built in for remote management, and also communicate to their tenants via USB or Serial or Emergency Power Off (EPO) Port.

        You shouldn’t have to write a script that polls battery status, the UPS should tell you. Be told, don’t ask.

      • JustEnoughDucksEnglish
        2•10 months ago

        The problem is that for most self-hosters, they would be working and unavailable to do a graceful shutdown in any case even if they had a UPS unless they work fully from home with 0 meetings. If they are sleeping or at work, (>70% of the day for many or most) then it is useless without graceful shutdown scripts.

        I just don’t worry about it and go through the 10 minute startup and verification process if anything happens. Easier to use an uptime monitor like uptimekuma and log checker like dozzle for all of your services available locally and remotely and see if anything failed to come back up.