I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.
Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?
Entirely depends on the usecase. If it’s a NAS and you only watch a few movies in the evening: Turn it off.
I bult a fairly power-efficient server. Consumes less than 20W and spins down the harddisks if not in use.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore, my website would go down, my Fediverse instance wouldn’t pull any posts from American people who are awake during parts of the night. My emails and chat messages wouldn’t get delivered.
I don’t have a UPS. Also depends on the circumstances. I use ext4 as a filesystem which is kind of robust enough to handle power outages. And they’re rare where I live. A UPS would draw additional power and cost money. It’s not worth it for me at home.
Personally I try to avoid making anything in my home actually dependant on my server. I have a single lamp that can only be controlled from my phone and that’s only because it’s so rarely used that I didn’t want to put in the effort. Everything else is local first and only gets extended functionality from my server running.
I’ve had a couple issues with my zigbee stuff over the years on the server side and I would be really pissed if I wouldn’t be able to turn my lights on because I haven’t gotten around to fixing my server yet.
Sure. All that stuff has consequences. I also used to run a DNS Adblocker on that machine. So after a power outage, all the lights in the kitchen and livingroom (those are the smart ones) would turn on at full brighness (their default state). The internet wouldn’t ever come back since it’s missing its DNS server. Obviously I can’t get any notification of the incident, since my server is down… And I fall back to being reachable via phone or SMS. If my wife tells me via chat or email… That’s down, too.
I’m still working on a better solution. It ain’t easy, though. It’s certainly easier to use some cloud services and have other people keep the infrastructure running in some datacenters which have more redundancy… We have light switches, though. All my smart home stuff is just retrofitted. So we can still turn it off or on with the wall switches. I won’t change that until I come up with a solution to this problem. Until then, I’ve dialed things a bit back and I refrain from making everything “smart” when I can’t do it 100% reliably.
And it’s just some lights and the washing machine. While I am a nerd and tinkerer, I don’t see any good reason to own a smart toaster, fridge or Alexa. YMMV, of course.
Doesn’t your phone switch back to mobile service if the internet isn’t reachable on your LAN?
yes, the phone switches to mobile. It’s just all the selfhosted services that are missing, like my nextcloud, matrix chat, etc. And several apps complaining they can’t sync anymore or send messages. I don’t use that many cloud services, so it’ll be a lot of things I rely on. Browsing the web works. But I’ve changed things and moved the adblocker. So now that one issue is gone. It still doesn’t solve the real issue… But at least the wifi comes back on its own.
Do you selfhost email too?
Currently yes. I have a bit of a non-standard setup though. Like a business contract with my internet service provider, which includes a few perks that are required to send mail and are missing on a normal residential internet connection (static ip, dns reverse pointer). And generally 95% of people recommend not to do email yourself. I might change in the future. Back in the days it was a few bucks more a month, but they increased prices substantially. Either I move my mailserver to a VPS or save me some time and effort and switch to some email service like everyone else.
If you have Hue bulbs, you can buy little radios that attach to your light switch (or replacement light switches) that will still operate your lights when the server is down or the network is unavailable. It’s a worthwhile upgrade.