🥂 To coping

Yeah, I did Docker swarm on an older cluster of thin clients I had ~10 years ago but even that was overkill. I’ve avoided Kubernetes for the same reason.

Government surplus auction. Had to get power supplies and SSDs for them separately but still less expensive than what most used ones go for elsewhere.

I’m now running 9 of the Dell equivalents to those, and they’re doing well. Average 15-20 watts at normal load and usually no more than 30-35 watts running full tilt. 5 of them are unprovisioned but I got a good deal on them for $25/each so I couldn’t pass them up :shrug:.

Attempting to cable-manage the power bricks for more than 1 of these is the worst part of using them. The only life pro tip I can offer is to ditch the power bricks and buy a 65W USB-C power delivery adapter that’s in the “wall wart” style and also one of the USB-C to Lenovo power adapter cords. Those make cable management so much better.

I’m slow-walking season 3 for maximum enjoyment, so I’m not going to source a screenshot to memeify it, but:

Blazin’ Bev: I’m gonna light this Borg cube up like my first joint this morning.

Alternatively:

Me when I’m the only one in the friend group with a working lighter:

I’ve wanted an electric motorcycle ever since I first saw the “el Ninja” conversion forever ago.

sounds too good to be true?

Didn’t see a (suggested) price listed, so the devil’s in the dollar signs.

I downgraded from used enterprise gear to those ultra small form factor PCs. They sip power well enough on their own that I haven’t really bothered tuning anything. I suppose I could cap the frequency with cpufrequtils and set the governor to conservative rather than on-demand (I do this with my battery-powered RasPi projects) but I’m not sure how much difference that’ll make for my servers.

In the past, I had Docker Swarm setup and automation to collapse the swarm down to a single machine (powering the other ones down and back on with WoL) but that was more trouble than it was worth. On average load, the USFF PCs run at about 15 watts and don’t usually peak above 30 unless they’re rebooting or doing something very heavy. Even transcoding doesn’t break 20 watts since I’m using hardware acceleration.

The biggest power savings I found that was worth the effort was to just get rid of the enterprise gear, switch from VMs to Docker containers where possible, and get rid of stuff I’m not using (or only run it on-demand).

The only remaining enterprise power suck I have left is my managed switch. It’s a 2005-era dinosaur that’s loud and power hungry, but it’s been a workhorse I’m having a hard time parting with.

Like you’re thinking: put HAProxy on your OpenWRT router.

That’s what I do. The HAProxy setup is kind of “dumb” L7 only (rather than HTTP/S) since I wanted all of my logic in the Nginx services. The main thing HAProxy does is, like you’re looking for, put the SPOF alongside the other unavoidable SPOF (router) and also wraps the requests in Proxy Protocol so the downstream Nginx services will have the correct client IP.

Flow is basically:

LAN/WAN/VPN -> HAProxy -> Two Nginx Instances -> Apps

With HAProxy in the router, it also lets me set internal DNS records for my apps to my router’s LAN IP.

That would probably be considered a pickup line on Ferenginar

Ooof, this also has terrible implications for 2027:

EPUB (encrypted) means you have to use their reader app or maybe Adobe Digital Editions or some other walled-garden horseshit to read it. It seems to be up to either the author or the publisher on whether to offer it DRM-free. I haven’t found much rhyme or reason, but it looks like the ones from Simon and Schuster are available without DRM about 5 years after it’s been published.

I only buy DRM-free since I like to read on multiple devices (Kobo, Phone, or CalibreWeb in a browser in a pinch) and get tired of jailbreaking them myself. I’d gladly pay more for DRM free than not be able to read it without asking for permission every time or being locked to specific reader apps.

The real crime is that rag existing at all.

8 PoE ports. Nice. I’ve got a separate 5 port PoE switch currently and wouldn’t be sad about getting rid of that.

Definitely looking into it as my spring project.

I’ve been wanting to dive into the 10" rack space for a while now. Even saw there were some designs I could mostly 3D print. I recently decommissioned my last 19" rack appliance, so I guess I’m closer than ever now though I’d need to find a 16 port switch that would fit (would prefer that to linking two 8-port switches).

Haven’t really hosted anything on a Pi (except Kiwix on a spare Pi Zero W2) since I have a bunch of thin clients that I got dirt cheap in a bulk drunk eBay purchase. They’re more capable (though the Pi 5 is close if not entirely surpassing them now) and a bit easier to shove together.

How are the Orange Pis? I’ve not messed with them, but the specs look too good to be true.

Ugh, tell me about it. I downsized from rack servers to a bunch of mini PCs with the laptop-style power bricks and the rats nest went from “ugly but manageable” to “complete fustercluck”.

Recently splurged on some USB-C power-delivery adapters and the appropriate USB-C to laptop-style charger cables and that made things infinitely better. Wasn’t cheap (though not super expensive) but well worth it.

True, but the cost of my freedom has gone from $0.09 to $0.21 per KWh over the last 3 years lol.

It starts with one home server. Then you’re like “But if I just add another server, I can do this. Oh, well, this other thing really needs its own server, too, so what’s one more? Oh, I should separate the traffic from my home network, so I’ll need to get a managed switch. But now I need another server so I can do testing and maybe one more for development. And I can’t go without backups, so throw in a storage server. Ugh, what if the power goes out? Better get a couple of beefy UPSs to hold me over.”

Before you know it, you have:

• 12 terabytes of storage
• 11 servers serving
• 10 VLANs
• 9 cron jobs running
• 8 cables tangled
• 7 things a beeping
• 6 dead ports
• 5 rats nests of coooords
• 4 UPSs beeping
• 3 failing drives
• 2 loud switches
• And a soaring electric bill

https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/136101/q-squared/peter-david/