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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.

    There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.

    Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.




  • Cool, I recommend it!

    I have my public facing reverse proxy point to my public services, and I also have it set up as a “roadwarrior” VPN to my home. So, I can connect my phone via WireGuard to my VPS, and a local DNS resolves my private services to the private IP addresses in my home network (so, I also run a reverse proxy on my server, for internal services).

    I also have an off-site backup using this — just a raspberry pi and an HDD at family’s, that rsyncs+snapshots over the WireGuard network.

    I’m sure I’m not following all the best practices here, but so far so good.





  • I switched to Technitium and I’ve been pretty happy. Seems very robust, and as a bonus was easy to use it to stop DNS leaks (each upstream has a static route through a different Mullvad VPN, and since they’re queried in parallel, a VPN connection can go down without losing any DNS…maybe this is how pihole would have handled it too though).

    And of course, wildcards supported no problem.






  • I’ve been pleased with it. Family is very relaxed about projects like this, but yeah it’s low power draw. I don’t think I have anything special set up but the right thing to do for power would be to spin down drive when not in use, as power is dominated by the spinning rust.

    Uptime is great. Only hiccups are that it can choke when compiling the ZFS kernel modules, triggered on kernel updates. It’s an rpi 3/1GB RAM (I keep failing at forcing dkms to use only 1 thread, which would probably fix these hiccups 🤷).

    That said, it is managed by me, so sometimes errors go unnoticed. I had recent issues where I missed a week of rsync because I switched from pihole to technitium on my home server and forgot to point the remote rpi there. This would all have been fixed with proper cron email setup…I’m clearly not a professional :)



  • In much of California, it’s not the electric energy costs that are high, it’s the delivery/grid fees. Not that it matters as far as the electricity bill goes, but it’s worth noting.

    On my recent bill I paid 16¢/kWh for on-peak electric generation and 49¢/kWh for electric delivery. (There’s a small baseline credit for delivery so it’s a little more complicated, but you get the idea.)

    So if someone tries to tell you electricity is expensive because CA is a hippie state with lots of solar, I would be a little skeptical.