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Do you turn your servers off when you leave home? What is your line of thinking on this?
(lemmy.selfhostcat.com)
Why would you leave your home?
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
21 points (81.8% liked)
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Right, that's where my server is?!
With WFH and grocery delivery I only have to leave for dates and let’s be honest here…
I'm sure your lovely and you have your own server, what's not to love?
The real question is always in the comments.
Nah the whole point of my server is for running stuff I might want to access at any time
Anything I would be happy to choose to turn on and off probably ends up running on my desktop PC instead
Exact same for me, but I worry about some random electrical or bios issue that can’t be controlled when I’m gone.
Then you deal with it when you get back. Easy as that. If it is non-critical enough to turn off when you leave the house, then it is non-critical enough fix it later when you have time. Fixing software/bios/program errors are not time-sensitive.
Hardware now is EXTREMELY safe and it has to be tested against electrical surges, ESD events, and depending in the device, different temps in order to get CE conformity and UL ratings. There is a near-zero chance that it would cause a fire or something critical, especiallly because home servers typically are not under load most of the time.
I bought a Portable Power Station (e.g. Anker SOLIX C300) to use as an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for my homeserver (~ 40 Watt) to buy me - or better my utility company - a few hours in case the power fails.
No, otherwise the security cameras wouldn't record and that's precisely the opposite of what I want when I'm out.
My server exists to run programs around the clock, including backups for live sites, so turning them off wouldn't be appropriate.
What’s your plan when you leave town?
I don't have one. It's just a tiny single board computer and an HDD running reasonably stable scripts every few hours and a couple of small server programs. Nothing it's doing is critical, so in the rare case when something breaks, it stays broken until I fix it.
That’s sounds very low risk!
This is a confusing question since wouldn't you want vpn access and wouldn't one of your servers provide that?
What?? I didn't mentioned vpn access.
You didn't mention it directly, but if you want to access any of your hosted services remotely, you will almost certainly want some kind of VPN solution. I host a few things over HTTPS,, but there's no way I'm exposing anything critical directly to the internet.
Yeah I do do that as well :)
I’m just worried that something goes wrong hardware wise or bios wise and I can’t turn it off or it causes a house issue.
Get a KVM that gives you remote access if you're really worried but your server really should stay up without issue unless you have some faulty hardware or setup
Server is running the password manager for myself and family, and that needs to stay on while gone (there are ways of handling local copies and they sync later, but when ive accidentally had to troubleshoot that it sucks).
Then ive got nextcloud, which while i don't normally need things on there i do enough that it is nice to have.
stuff on ulv soc hardware i just leave on 24/7. those are < 10w or so each with a load, so nbd.
anything i want to be able to get at remotely also stays on, obviously, as does anything required for the internet access and routing to get to it.
everything else is stuff that even gets shut down at bedtime unless it's "doing something".
everything gets shutdown and unplugged if i am going out of town for more than a weekend and have no need for anything to be on. which has happened a whole one time in the last 25 years.
So if you need to have access to files or containers but will be gone more than a weekend would you shut it down and take files with you, forget the container servers, or leave them going?
if that ever happens, i'd cross the bridge then. but i'd probably shut everything down. if i'm in 'vacay' mode and not at home, i wouldn't care about connecting to stuff at home. if i'm in 'work' mode, i'm taking shit with me i might need or putting it on space at the office before i leave.
i don't have what some would consider 'vital' services running. like alert notifications systems for various 'detectors' (co, power, flood, fire, etc), security cam recordings, and what not.
- Never put network connectivity on server-class hardware. Low-power devices exist for this reason. Use them.
- If you need to access your information remotely when you're away and it's running on server-class hardware. Don't. It's a needless waste of power.
- If you're talking about accessing your porn collection when you're on vacation. Don't. Enjoy your vacation.
I suppose it depends on your use case, but I would disagree with points 1 and 2. Network connectivity has an effect on your entire network and is absolutely crucial. Pfsense/OPNSense, DNS, etc should always be on server-class hardware. I run these as VM, but I would argue that best practice is to have them on their own bare-metal server-class hardware. File storage is also incredibly important, and even with backups, I don't want my NAS going down. It also runs on server class-hardware.
The two items you mentioned are the two items I would be least comfortable running on consumer-grade hardware.
My server rack gets shut off in only two cases: I lose power and am too slow in firing up the generator before the UPS shuts the servers down, or I need to do major maintenance (like replacing a PCIe card). So, virtually never for the most part.
Too many important sevices need to stay running, even when I'm not at home.
You don’t worry when you’re out of town?
I’m in the same situation
I am virtually never out of town, but if I was, then no, I wouldn't worry.
If there was a technical problem that left my servers inaccessible, then oh well. It's the same scenario as if I had shut them off. I'd fix it when I get back. This has never happened, though. I've had VMs crash, but I have never had a situation where any of my servers were completely inaccessible.
The only situation I can think of where I'd need to immediately shut down a server would be a drive failure in my ZFS array, but the chances of this happening in conjunction with a loss of connectivity are exceedingly unlikely. If it was a major concern, I'd write a script to power down the server when a drive fails.
Never, and it has battery back up in case of power failure. Automation, security cameras, HVAC controls, file sharing, etc. running on it.
That’s no way to get five nines! 😂
I'm more of a nine fives guy anyway.
But the big brain move is that planned outages don't count against five nines.
lol
The server stays on, always. I have like ten people using the services on there over tailscale. There's a kvm, should something really unexpected happen.
How did you get your users through the tailscale process? I fear the tailscale sign in process is dissuading my potential users.
The younger ones didn't mind it, for the older ones I did it myself while on visit.
My proxmox is LAN only running on a decade old beat up laptop. So yes.
You turn it off because it’s old?
No because it's LAN only, but also because I don't want to torture anymore than I've to.😂😂😂
I do it if I'll be away more than just couple of days. Some of my hardware is pretty old at this point and I'm just a little paranoid about the possible fire hazard. I'm sure it would be fine to leave everything running but no real harm in shutting it down either.
That's my biggest concern as well! My biggest server is put together by random parts I had...