I’m sure once I’ve finished setting it up, it will likely be on all the time. I just need to find a better physical home for the server. A good thing is that the PoE switch I have is also covered by the UPS (that’s plugged into TrueNAS, both USB and power).
That’s fantastic about having a read only SD Card
Sorry, when you said Core, did you mean Scale? I thought that was the container friendly version? I have installed TrueNAS Scale on a spare physical machine, it’s fantastic and I’m half tempted to wait until Stable Release before I do the final setup. That does mean re-testing though.
You’re right there’s no reason for the Pi, I only got it because the TrueNAS box isn’t always turned on…plus it’s quite power hungry, so I only want it on full time when there’s a near constant use of it.
That is a completely different can of worms (the power draw of always on electronics at home). In the years I have always tried to keep that to a minimum, but lately the situation got kind of out of hand. Being stuck at home for a couple years now because of COVID didn’t help.
My Truenas are running on HP Microserver Gen8s , pretty old hardware, but 8 Xeon threads, 1 LSI 8 port controller, 2 10TB hard drives and 4 SSDs draw about 50W at idle, 65 when transcoding 1080p in plex (not really powerful enough to transcode 4k) …
Yeah, Covid certainly did change things - I was lucky that I rented an office and electric was unlimited…now I’m home though, I’m trying to be a bit more careful.
Wow, your server is really low on power, way better than mine Mine has an idle 130 Watts, and when 4 HDD’s wake up it can be 180…although I need to double check this as other things are plugged into the same plug monitor. I’m re-using an old workstation of mine, E5-1650v4 on an X99-E WS Motherboard with 64GB RAM, 9 HDD’s and 2x SSD’s (boot). Also an NVMe for jails/plugins. Mine does CPU transcoding, but not much as 99% of the time it’s playing locally.
I have one with Core, the other with Scale, backing each other up … pool imported well, had to re-create my shares, I had a BHYVE vm (pfsense) that I just restarted with KVM and worked … go figure. Haven’t moved the Raspberry ISCSI LUNs and the docker setup yet, but I’m waiting for a weekend where I’m bored to spice things up
Ahhh, I guess that makes sense It’s a shame I have nothing useful that can make use of it. Oddly enough I built a snap shot machine for my TrueNAS instance (i3-9100 on Supermicro board), it’s so low power when compared and I wondered a few times about using that instead as a primary. Thing is, I might want to tinker and create jails to do things, not too sure yet, but at least in theory I’d have some power.
I turned off 4 cores once and made it a 2C/4T machine, didn’t make a worthwhile difference to power usage, I guess it’s the board and the generation age.
I guess also the CPU / board does have Overclocking abilities (the CPU is restricted), may be I can lower the clockspeed…hmm.
@ChrisA, could you go into more detail as to why you didn’t like mesh systems. It sounds like a mesh system would be perfect for my use case. I should go into more detail about my use case. My wife has quit smoking. Now, she is kicking me outside every time I light a cigar. The problem is the Internet coverage outside. We don’t have any 5g coverage where we live, so I am stuck with the cheap AP provided by our internet provider, and my tablet keeps dropping from the AP every time I try and use it outside. I thought of putting an Unifi Ap under the porch roof, but since I would have to use a wire to connect it to our router, that idea is out. My wife wouldn’t prove the exposed wire on the kitchen ceiling, the hole in the kitchen wall so I could reach the dining room where all our network equipment is kept. Does anyone have any ideas?
I’m more than happy to share my limited knowledge, but like @ucav117 said, it’s best you start a new thread for the benefit of the forum structure. I thought I’d do this for you, so do click here to continue this discussion.
I have bought a Raspberry Pi, successfully loaded Rasbian and Unifi on there and all is well. Just need to switch everything over to it.
Personally, I recommend not running the Unifi controller at all times (in fact, I recommend keeping it off until you need to add new APs, change passwords, etc.). All it does is push configurations and collect logs, and occasionally bugs out and pegs your CPU at 100% until you restart the software. The APs run exactly the same with the controller turned off (and they store their configurations - they don’t need to re-contact the controller if there’s a power outage), it’s not like Ruckus where the controller actually coordinates the APs to improve the experience.
Now, if you like having a Grafana dashboard, I think the controller does need to run at all times, but unless you plan on doing something like that, it’ll be less headache in the long run to only run it when needed.
Then I found a cheap TP link AP and threw even cheaper Cat6 down to the end of the garden
I would recommend not doing this. You either need to put your normal cat6 in conduit (or it’ll degrade within a few years and you’ll have to replace it) or use flooded core cabling, which is designed to be buried and will hold up to the elements.
Another thing you should keep in mind is the need for grounding. All it takes is one lightning strike to hit the cabling or conduit and fry all the wired devices on your network. The best way to prevent this is to use fiber (since it caries no electricity, it will not be struck if lightning hits nearby), but that requires you already have electricity at the shed to convert to ethernet and have a POE injector or switch running (and then adding another UPS out there since you mentioned having one in your house).
Either way, as it currently stands, if you get thunderstorms in your area, consider this a ticking time bomb. 8 Bit Guy made a video where he talked about this happening and frying lots of his and his parents’ devices multiple times, even with an ethernet surge protector.
Other than that, enjoy the wifi. The sky is the limit if your wallet is deep enough.
Really? I only wanted to keep it running so I get notification when someone joins the network. I have had it turned off quite it a bit, and like you say, the wifi still works without issue, which is a relief! That is good to know about power outages though.
I wouldn’t either, but I was in a jam and it was a ‘temporary’ setup. With perhaps some luck, this setup worked for a few years, in fact I only just removed that cable. I’ve now got some decent cable, which will eventually go in below ground conduit.
You’re absolutely spot on, for this reason the final connection from office to house will be fibre (1x1G and 1x10G). The CAT only exists for redundancy and will be disconnected when not in use. I did waffle on about it here and get some great info from the L1 commun’:
Luckily, where I live there is a very low chance of thunderstorms, perhaps 1 a year. I watched that video a while back, also I think Craft Computing mentioned having a similar experience.
But yes, UPS all round. It is a bit disturbing that they don’t necessarily protect against hardware damage…at least they’d minimise it I guess.
My wallet is shallow, but I’m doing the best I can
You can keep it running if you want, but you’ll need to check on it occasionally since it does lock up from time to time. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, it just happens.
It usually takes at least a few weeks before it happens (in my experience), so if you put a cron job in to restart the service once a week, you’d probably be fine.
Do your switches only have 1xSFP and 1xSFP+? Or do you mean 1 cat6a & 1 fiber?
If it’s the former, I’d recommend only using the SFP+ because good luck getting link aggregation working across interfaces with different speeds.
If the latter, I’d recommend running more fiber. The cost to install 1 vs 4 cables now is much cheaper than it will be later on after construction is finished. You can then do all the link aggregation you want to max out your network, or just label them as backups in case one fails.
For lightning, UPSs can help reduce the blast radius, but they are not the end-all-be-all. Whole-home lightning arrestors are certainly more expensive but provide far more protection. Of course, if you have DSL or cable internet and lightning strikes the coax or phone line, you’ll need to have them grounded through the lightning arrestor or you could see plenty of damage from it. (This happened at my mom’s house, though the modem survived somehow. The switch lost 4 ports and the router had to be replaced. By some miracle, nothing else was hit.)
I have 3 switches in total:
2 x Netgear Prosafe GS110TP (8 x 1G Cat, 2 x 1G SFP)
1 x Microtik long name 10G (4 x 10G SFP+, 1x Cat)
The intention between home and detached office is to have:
1 x 1G SFP
1 x 10G SFP+
1-2 Cat6 (for redundancy, unplugged)
The only reason for the SFP+ connection is to give high speed connection between workstation(s) in the office and the server (in the house), as I have to shift large’ish files. Don’t worry, no interest in LAG, though I have tried it and it was quite nice.
I’ve got the 1G SFP link solely to a PoE switch, for security cameras, the 1 AP and anything else I might connect later on.
That’s good info, thank you. I am having an overhaul of the home electrics (it’s all very old) soon, I’ll certainly see if arrestors can be included. Lightning protection over here in the UK is commonly overlooked, in part because we rarely have those types of storms. Sometimes a year or two can pass between 30 minute thunder storms. Like you say though, it only has to happen once to fry stuff - because I work from my home office, when the lightning starts, I tend to unplug everything in the office and do some manual work around the house (that’s not related to electric!). That’s strange about your mom’s though, how the modem survived?
I have noticed that some of my UPS’s have anti-surge CAT ports, I wonder if they’re worth using. I did buy an anti-surge adaptor for the phone line, a Telephone Engineer said it wasn’t of that much use in the event of a direct strike. To be fair though, if I got one of those, I’d buy a lottery card straight away, as the odds are winning/being struck are probably about the same over here.
But when exactly does this run? It’s fairly easy to find out:
$ grep run-parts /etc/crontab
17 * * * * root cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6 * * 7 root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6 1 * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly )
If we plug the 47 6 * * 7 into https://crontab.guru/, we can find that this will run at 06:47 on Sundays.
But if we need this to be more specific, we can instead do crontab -e and insert a line like this:
47 2 * * 6 /opt/twitch-scrape/run-site-update
To run the script at 02:47 every Saturday instead.
CRS305?
I’m jealous. Where I live, thunderstorms are practically every other day during the summer. It’s a legitimate threat with our frequencies.
It’s our theory that it hit the modem. It, the switch, router, and two computers were plugged into the same UPS (all on the battery backup side), but it was only the switch and router which sustained any (visible) damage. Nothing else in the house was hit (to our knowledge). And the cable to the modem doesn’t run to the TVs, as the TVs are fed by a $20 aerial antenna mounted inside. If TVs got destroyed and she still had Spectrum TV, it would be obvious how it happened, but none could since my mom had dropped the TV package before this occurred.
Most of the UPSs I’ve seen only do 10/100, and if they advertise 10/100/1000, there’s a good chance there will be reviews claiming it doesn’t work properly and you’ll be negotiated down to 10/100. In any case, I wouldn’t put much faith in these devices.
Wow, thank you for all of this, really appreciated
Yes, that’s the one. I really like the PoE powering ability.
Wow, where do you live then, in that thunderstorm belt in the US? I can understand your caution towards them, then.
That’s fairly unlucky, but lucky at the same time.
That makes sense, I don’t have faith in it for lightning strikes, but it’s pretty good when we have a power cut (1 every 1-2 years). I do have a dedicated anti-surge for the router/modem, just in case. Though I do have 2-3 spare ones if needed - just simple ones or replacement ones that I never used.
I figured, I have one sitting in the closet that I replaced with a CRS309.
Yep, gotta love it. My apartment has surprisingly stable power compared to some of the ones just a few miles away (probably because there’s several large office parks less than a mile down the highway), but my mom’s house regularly has short power outages during thunderstorms.
Ah jeez, that’s a real shame about your mom’s, I guess when settlements occurred there many moons ago, electric hadn’t been invented so they didn’t see any problem with living there.
There are already UPSs for the computers and network equipment in the house because of the power problems. The ones I have at my apartment have seen a grand total of 1 power outage, which lasted less than a second. At first I was wondering if I was just imagining a power flicker until I realized the internet died (I forgot to plug my ONT into the UPS with the rest of the network equipment and had to wait for it to come back).
Mine has an idle 130 Watts, and when 4 HDD’s wake up it can be 180…although I need to double check this as other things are plugged into the same plug monitor. I’m re-using an old workstation of mine, E5-1650v4 on an X99-E WS Motherboard with 64GB RAM, 9 HDD’s and 2x SSD’s (boot). Also an NVMe for jails/plugins. Mine does CPU transcoding, but not much as 99% of the time it’s playing locally.
