Hi there,
I’m hosting matrix for family use on a server at my place. The issue is my home is affected by internet and electricity outages - which we’re trying to fix. This means that there are frequent downtimes on the chat. I have a UPS but usually is not enough to power everything - router and server - for longer periods of time.
The internet downtime is easy to fix as my router supports fallback connection which I point to a mobile internet solution.
I’ve thought about moving everything to a VPS but then I’m a bit wary of privacy regarding the data there. There’s also the option of moving the server to a family member’s house but I want this this be last resort because that makes maintenance harder.
Anyone dealt with this issues and found a solution? Perhaps a fallback mechanism that temporarily hosts the sever on a VPS? :D
not dealt with such a thing, but a decomissioned phone or laptop is the most obvious solution. they come with batteries, have seamless transition between power and battery, and you’re reusing shit nobody wants no more.
laptops you can get cheap when they have like busted screens and any reasonably modern (like decade old) can operate in sub-5W territory; coupled with a good battery, that should provide you with tens of hours of battery powered use, and you can expand that, with powerbanks and such.
alternatively, a cheap phone that can run postmarketOS or mobian. even lower consumption and more options to extend power availability.
After having my server fail to recover after a power failure while I was out of town for an extended period, I moved all important server apps to an relatively inexpensive (<$200) laptop.
The battery is firmware limited to a 70% charge which means it will last for years with no significant safety concerns. Even at a partial charge, Debian indicates 7 hours of run time when the power fails (I’ve had none longer than 4), and it’s unaffected by power blinks. It saves a bit of electricity too and costs $150 less per year to run than my old UPS alone.
It’s been running for nearly 2 years without a hitch.
Check periodically for bulging batteries, you might have to remove the back cover to detect such a condition depending on model.
I used to run a laptop as well but I have had batteries die like that twice, and that’s a fire concern as well specially if you have it stored away in a closed and never physically check it.
Keeping charge at 70% doesn’t help, you need to powercycle the battery regularly to prevent batteries to die on you
Get a power station with built-in UPS. I use an ALLPOWERS.
A generator that kicks on when the power goes out. A UPS isn’t for extended runtime, it’s the bridge the gap until the generator is running. (Or for graceful shutdown if there is no generator.)
Not necessarily. A bit of both I would say. My servers can run a few hours on the UPS but bellow a certain threshold it shuts my servers off safely. For most power outages that’s enough to keep things running.
It may be simplest to move it to a hosted server. Depending on the length of outages, your comfort with electrical things, and your budget, you could get a bigger battery and use the inverter in the UPS (there are caveats-the inverter in the UPS is not rated for higher end of its load past the battery capacity it’s got and may burn itself out, and the charger may not work properly with the larger battery or with different chemistry), or get a battery/inverter box like a Ecoflow or that sort of thing. Solar may be a good bet too.
I don’t know about matrix but failing over between public IPs probably requires a HA sync of some type and also DNS failover.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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Just a noob question about your setup: do you have a TLD domain name? Are you behind NAT? just because I wanna set a chat server like matrix or xmpp but I’ve been stuck in how to make it available on the web with these restrictions like no domain, no fixed IP and.behind NAT
Besides a Generac, like @frongt@lemmy.zip is talking about, UPS aren’t for long term power supplies. I like my Generac whole house. We have ice storms in this area and I like the creature comforts that electricity brings with it. LOL Personally, I would host on a VPS. You might rummage around in Low End Box to find a suitable deal on which to host. Or host your chat server on something with low power draw like a NUC, but eventually, the UPS is going to drain.
host the important services on an low power pc like an pi. that should give you more time.
In matrix, chats with e2e encryption are protected from hoster even if they would try to steal your data.
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They still won’t be able to read chats themselves.
It’s not sotred in plain text, but encrypted.
Meta data is still available
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I don’t believe any consumer available software is capable of defending from nation state attacks. Physical access or not.
