I am an adult with fixed work and pre-defined vacation periods. I leave my home for several weeks at a time, several times on the year.
I have all my hardware and servers in my home, on two locations: my main server rack in the garage and my networking cabinet in the attic of the house.
Having spent the spring doing just about everything that everyone does in a HomeLab / SoHoLab environment, and work, I was looking forward to a few vacation weeks. In that planning it suddenly hit me... "I don't want all my servers running while I am away for a few weeks!". Waste of power if nothing else. Lack of onsite monitoring is also a factor. So I had to revise my setup, what runs on the servers I would shut down? Do I want to keep any of it powered on?
Do someone recognize the situation? You may want to leave Internet access on, the ip-telephony on, the alarm on, some sensors for temperature and water and such, on. The problem is described above, you have some or all of those apps in virtual machines on a physical server you would rather leave off while you are away.
Having OPNSense just like that made me reconsider its implementation. I don't want it on a server I may shut down for extended leaves. I want it on a low power 1U or smaller in my network cabinet inside the house, protected by alarms and , in theory, inaccessible from outside. Same goes for other applications like my web site monitoring, Matomo app and the UISP for my Ubiquiti Edge network hardware.
So now some may start thinking about why I don't put that on servers and clouds outside my home and office? I could do that for some apps. The thing is I like to have all under my hood. It's controllable, inexpensive and accessible. I do not trust AWS or any Cloud solutions...
As it is, I will be putting a short 1U appliance computer to host my OPNSense in the network cabinet - TBH it should have gone there in the first place.
What considerations and ideas do you have? Have you thought about this and what did you do about it?
I have all my hardware and servers in my home, on two locations: my main server rack in the garage and my networking cabinet in the attic of the house.
Having spent the spring doing just about everything that everyone does in a HomeLab / SoHoLab environment, and work, I was looking forward to a few vacation weeks. In that planning it suddenly hit me... "I don't want all my servers running while I am away for a few weeks!". Waste of power if nothing else. Lack of onsite monitoring is also a factor. So I had to revise my setup, what runs on the servers I would shut down? Do I want to keep any of it powered on?
Do someone recognize the situation? You may want to leave Internet access on, the ip-telephony on, the alarm on, some sensors for temperature and water and such, on. The problem is described above, you have some or all of those apps in virtual machines on a physical server you would rather leave off while you are away.
Having OPNSense just like that made me reconsider its implementation. I don't want it on a server I may shut down for extended leaves. I want it on a low power 1U or smaller in my network cabinet inside the house, protected by alarms and , in theory, inaccessible from outside. Same goes for other applications like my web site monitoring, Matomo app and the UISP for my Ubiquiti Edge network hardware.
So now some may start thinking about why I don't put that on servers and clouds outside my home and office? I could do that for some apps. The thing is I like to have all under my hood. It's controllable, inexpensive and accessible. I do not trust AWS or any Cloud solutions...
As it is, I will be putting a short 1U appliance computer to host my OPNSense in the network cabinet - TBH it should have gone there in the first place.
What considerations and ideas do you have? Have you thought about this and what did you do about it?