A solar powered website that goes offline when there's no power
2 days ago by Gekkonen to c/selfhosted
This website made me reconsider if 99.9999% SLA and always online is really that important for lots of websites. I used to self-host my own server in my own apartment, but gave up on that after my internet provider had their first major outage that lasted almost a week. Also I didn't want to worry about the fire hazard, or the server going down when I was traveling etc.
But a solar powered server seems interesting, if the batteries could be made fire safe.
I didn't turn it down, so it's obviously up.
Schrödingers home server
This reminds me of a news story from the start of Covid.
Tanzanian President, "We have zero bases of Covid!"
Rest of the Earth, "Cool beans! How did you do it‽"
Tanzany Prez, "Easy, we just didn't test for it."
Trump: "If you stop the testing, the cases will go down. Drink bleach! UV buttplugs!"
USA: "Let's try another dangerously old guy for a bit, but if eggs are too expensive after a few years we'll give this guy another shot."
Your business will not collapse because of 10 min of downtime a week, and if it does that is not technologies fault.
Hospitals? Air traffic control? Power grid operators? Like these are exceptional businesses, but they're out there.
Many airports are closed at night.
Good point, but that's planned downtime.
Those do actually go down. Hospitals have to be evacuated after an earthquake, airports force all aircraft to divert or the grid has the sort of outage that gets it's own Wikipedia page and needs to be black started.
Those do actually go down.
That's the point I'm making: when those examples go down unplanned, in particular hospitals and the power grid, in particular the examples you gave, those can be catastrophic events. I.e., if we ignore planned downtime, then these businesses really need five lines of reliability during the times they are expected to be up.
I agree with the overall point that the average business doesn't need five nines of availability, but I wanted to point out that there are definitely businesses that do.
I found the GitHub employee! 😉
There are plentiful scenarios where 10 minutes of sequential downtime would be a critical issue. Say you're a telecoms or internet provider - even a one minute delay to a life-saving message can be enough for someone to die.
Furthermore, lots of things are interconnected now. Your business might be able to handle 10 minutes of downtime, but lets say my business relies on 12 different service providers like you, who each have 10 minutes of downtime during a week using your rationale. That could up being 2hrs of downtime each week.
99.999% is about 5 minutes and 16 seconds of downtime per year.
12 services down perfectly sequentially works out to 76 minutes per year, not 2hours per week.
Not saying there aren't applications where that can't be catastrophic, but you're scale is off for three 9 downtime.
I don't even bother to track my home setup
I host home assistant and if anything goes down I'll notice pretty fast.
Companies claiming 99.9999 uptime is an absurd goal for a SLA, and wouldn’t even survive a small internet outage like a DDoS attack or Akamai outage. I remember in the 90s selling the idea of 5 9’s - 99.999% on my resume until some manager who Interviewed me asked me to state the expected downtime. I stopped claiming that number because it’s impossible without full active redundancy in different locations and not dependent on external providers like cloudflare ever going down.
And please don’t argue maintenance windows “cover it” because that’s not how they work in the real world today.
Downtime per year:
- 99% ~3.65 days (5,256 min)
- 99.9% ~8.77 hours (526 min)
- 99.99% ~52.6 min
- 99.999% ~5.26 min
- 99.9999% ~31.5 seconds
For my home lab I’m happy my stuff is online and content I hardly lose access when there’s a power outage thanks to my ups. But if I tracked I’d be closer to 95%. Good enough but I can’t wait till I just don’t care to run anything.
I worked for a "99.999%" up time facility. No one talks about the exceptions that don't effect that number. Some are out of our hands like weather or a knob w/ a backhoe.
Others are just made up by upper management to hit the numbers for their bonuses.
Also, any non-trivial system has failure modes that are not binary. Like, if your convertible car has the roof stuck down you can drive it, but you will be sad if it rains. So, is the car "up" or not? Similarly, if your site has writes offline for a database upgrade, but reads work fine, is it "up"?
The concept is just advertising and something that makes sense to senior management, but provides no actual useful metrics.
100% uptime since the last time we turned it on!
Well.... Sorta works half the time, but we deleted the bad reviews
Only if there is no power everywhere. Some run redundancies in multiple locations.
There's a nifty project on Mastodon where someone is running an instance entirely on solar (and I think a battery?). They've been tinkering with some of the code to do things like optimise images for reduced weight or CPU cost.
The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so people can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.
congrats guys! we killed it!
Uptime for home users is useless. More important is recovery, reboot and resume (the 3'Rs)
You server should reboot automatically, storage should restore itself from unsafe shutdown and your services should resume operations like nothing happened.
This means test your reboot, ensure stuff doesn't break, and so on.
Failing storage after an hard reboot is the hardest.
For network, i have two ISP connections and a an auto switch script Incase one goes down. But honestly it's overkill and not needed for 99% of home hosters.
Buying some kind of UPS like a battery powered power strip is also nice but keep in mind that require maintenance to replace batteries once every few years (long enough to forget) and so be useless. The ups shall only last enough to perform a controlled server shutdown using NUTS.
I used to work on the website for a utility company that insisted on ridiculous uptime. Our major deployments risked taking the system down for a few seconds, though in practice that never happened.
As a result, they made us do deployments starting at 3:00 in the morning since that was the least active time on the site. Fuuuuuuuuck that place.
This was cool 5 years ago, now you can get solar panels and a home battery big enough to power this thing 24x7 without an issue, even if the sun was fully blacked out for a week
edit: a 40kwh battery would last with the power draw:
Power usage 2.62W
like over a year
There's a lot of articles about supply based usage vs demand based energy production on that website. The idea that it turns off every now and then is sort of part of the authors' intention of showing "we can live with some outages".
This article in particular is a good one: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/...
I think you entirelly missed the point then
Now they can get better hardware, but should they? They take seriously the low tech part, and part of being low tech is fighting against consumerism culture and keeping with what they have, which is wotking fine
A 40Kwh battery is like 10 grand, I'm not sure why you brought that up. I'd be more likely to invest in a second battery and solar panel. It's been up for over 23 weeks right now, I'd guess a second solar panel and battery could keeping it up nearly 100% of the time, and it'd cost under $100 for a 200wh battery and 30w panel.
Lead-acid batteries work if you don't care about weight and lithium-iron phosphate if you do
You're better off with the LiFePO4 batteries even if you don't care about weight. A lead acid battery will wear out quickly when you cycle it daily. Lithium also has a higher charging efficiency, so you get more usable power from the solar panel.
Lithium-iron is about 2x more expensive, there might be different availability and energy use during manufacture is probably higher
Over a period of roughly one year (351 days, from 12 December 2018 to 28 November 2019) the server was up for 95.26% of the time. This means that we were offline for 399 hours (which corresponds to 16.64 days).
Not bad at all really, at least for non-mission critical sites. I have solar and I really like it. Solar power on two barns, and a lot of my security cams run on solar. I'm not sure if it's the formatting of this site, or the grainy pictures, but it oddly reminds me of the Trojan Room coffee pot.
I would be curious to know this uptime relative to any other self-hosted sites.
I remember Reddit and Twitter constantly suffering from uptime issues and they were far more decentralized, with modern infrastructure to match.
Is 95.2% all that far out of the realm of expectation?
Well, the article did go on to provide better stats once they changed out the panel and battery:
Since then, the uptime has been 100% (March to September 2020), even though we have added a lot of content by making the website multilingual. This is due to the larger (brand new) battery but also to the better orientation of the smaller solar panel. The battery’s capacity will decline over time, so the higher storage capacity will make it last longer. If the uptime remains 100% through the winter 2020/2021, we will probably downgrade to a 20W solar panel.
Well of course you gotta think, Reddit and Twitter were also probably getting a lot more hits than Low Tech Mag 😅
garage is a software project made for communal home hosting. Tech literates will talk about its S3 API but that's the least interesting part: the most interesting is that it has been purposely built to be hosted on (actual) commodity hardware like second-hand nucs, running on flaky home power and internet and linked together through usual isps. Nodes may come up and down but the cluster withstands all of that.
Garage would be a pretty nice project to run a solar-powered mini-cluster. If sufficiently far from each other, you could even run without polluting batteries !
"Hey look everyone! We never heard of grid scale batteries!"
This website is like 10 years old from memory, well before grid-scale batteries were widespread (well they still aren't in many countries).
Right, and I'm older than the Sony Walkman and that's why I never heard about "internet".
Scaling means you buy 2 instead of one.
That is literally the opposite definition to scalable. Scalable things don't require twice the resources for twice the capacity.
Buy two instead of one is exactly the worst case scalability you can have.
95% of the world grid storage capacity is pumped storage hydro and batteries will literally never be able to compete because water is the cheapest energy storage medium we could possibly have at grid scale. North America was the world leader on PSH in the 1970-2000 but now China is eating our lunch and our governments no longer have the ability to start real infrastructure projects because of crony capitalism.
I can't believe we're watching China become the world leader in renewables while we pretend like batteries are a smart way of storing GWhs of power because that's the most profitable solution to the private sector.
Enjoy your water.
At one point in time, I was obsessed with getting a Thinkpad to the lowest power consumption possible.
I think I managed to drop it down to ~3w, with the screen and radio fully disabled.
Appreciate the website itself, with it's dithered low-colour PNG illustrations.
It's not like those major social media sites don't have some kind of data center (or rent one) in every "major" (population wise) timezone they operate in. Your other arguments still hold true, but I think even then it would be better for all of us if those websites went down every now and then.
Use a gell cell lead acid battery (the kind that go in regular UPSs). No fire hazzard, ans bonus, they can survive freezing temperatures just fine if outdoors. Downside is replacing a cheap battery every 3 years.
i love this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting
It's late summer now, best possible time to measure solar-powered uptime. Roughly 5 months, i.e. since mid March, i.e. springtime in Spain. Many daylight hours.
Having everything open, on and available 24/7/365 sounds nice until you realize the human toll for things which aren’t that necessary and can be planned around. Down time is a good thing.
Interesting concept. I haven't seen lowtechmagazine before, going to have to definitely check it out.
I spin down our development environments when they have sit idle for a period of time, not at all the same but makes me think deeper about the entire concept.
Update: This is a really cool website. I see some fun projects here too that I could have my kids work on!
It's nearly 20 years old. Originally a Belgian site only available on the .be domain.
His blog got integrated in an other website for a while but then came back to www.lowtech.be after some years.
On that site: Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse - Throughout history, people have bathed in public rather than in private. Should we bring back the public bathhouse for the sake of sustainability?
The max amount of people I want in a bathtub is 2.
Eh.. a bath house != Bath tub
Bath houses still exist in Japan and a bunch of other countries. They don't feel thaaaat weird after the initial shock wears off.
after the initial shock wears off.
Your shock or mine? The problem is akin to females that protest the patriarchy by taking off their clothes in public. I never seems to be any of the beautiful people.
Other people don't exist for our entertainment or amusement. If a "not beautiful" person wants to be naked, that's their choice.
But why would they be talking about using batteries for their non-solar setup, which was the context.
Also it still seems like a weird concern. Again. Unless we were talking about the solar setup and they're worried they fucked something up or something. And even still. You don't need much battery for an rpi or whatever.
Does anyone remember when businesses would operate their websites only during business hours and then take most of the functionality offline after hours?
I'm possibly also mis-remembering my early internet years and just talking shit.
This is sometimes still a thing. I know of at least one religious news organisation that takes the website offline on Sundays.
B&H Photo will not process your order on the Jewish day of rest, it's amazing. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/...
New York State's civil service pension/retirement system is still like this. Including holidays.
we did have those with BBSes for sure
IIRC, the USA Social Security Administration's website operates somewhat like this, because they seem to still do batch processing (a la mainframes) during the evening hours. As a result, they prevent people from logging in so that they don't get interstitial data about their public pension.
Still possible with big enough battery and solar panel
Or maybe another form of renewable energy?
Of course, it depends on the website. I'd be unhappy if my banking site went down for more than a day.
ihavenotv.com could go down for weeks, and I wouldn't fret it.
Cute, even if deeply impractical for most server applications.
We need more of those weird enthusiast projects around, and we need to hear of them.
Still, going all green and then selling sets of four physical books is a little odd.
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@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
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Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
go to feed...
I have never been a fan of anything above 3 nines of uptime even in a business situation.
Your business will not collapse because of 10 min of downtime a week, and if it does that is not technologies fault.
I don't even bother to track my home setup.
save