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I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. In this case replacing a typical route

by j1elo 5y ago

I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. In this case replacing a typical router (which consumes like a lightbulb), with a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power). I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills! For me, it's either a Raspberry Pi type of power consumption, or else a server that only powers on when needed. But I haven't learned yet how to do the latter, if possible at all. In fact this is a nice place to ask: how would you build a "something" that monitors the network for packets sent to powered-off machines, then somehow caches the request, powers the destination machine On, and finally lets the request continue to its target? Has this been tackled anywhere? There must be tons of people wanting a homeserver but living in places where electricity has a considerable cost...

philjohn 5y ago
There is a middle ground - either an Intel Atom or Intel Celeron based server - typically use around 10w and you still get niceties like SATA and even PCIe
- easygenes 5y ago
  Also plenty of slightly more capable laptop class SKUs that are in this ballpark.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    Can you still find "desktop" motherboards to go with them? A long time ago, I remember there being desktop MBs for the Pentium M.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      For an always running thing, choosing a laptop motherboard is a nice way to guarantee all the power saving features will work properly. Most desktop motherboards won't allow the PCI express bus to sleep for example, using an extra ~4 watts, $8 per year in eco-friendly countries. Across the ~10 years your NAS will probably sit in a cupboard, that's $80, which isn't an awful lot, but probably would have let you buy a bigger SSD or hard drive which would have had more utility.
      - vladvasiliu 5y ago
        That's true, but then again I wouldn't be comfortable with a single-disk NAS... However, for running random VMs, etc, I think a laptop is quite a good proposition.
- ttsiodras 5y ago
  If you are OK with external USB drives, I did just that with my Atomic PI [1] (Atom-based, 35$ SBC, 3.5W idle, running Debian on its internal EMMC, with two external USB drivers in ZFS-mirror configuration). [1] https://www.thanassis.space/atomicpi.html https://www.thanassis.space/atomicpi.html
  - philjohn 5y ago
    You can also get rackmount servers in 1U format with Atom CPU's that support 4 3.5" drives, e.g. https://www.broadberry.co.uk/intel-atom-rackmount-servers/cyberserve-atom-104s https://www.broadberry.co.uk/intel-atom-rackmount-servers/cy...
baybal2 5y ago
What a lot of other people don't realise: - There is no such thing as a 25gbps home router. What's currently on the market is a very serious overkill ever for 10gbps.
- great-potential 5y ago
  In terms of CPU it is not totally overkill if you're using an IPS/IDS, bare in mind you'll also be disabling most of the network card offloading in a full fledged firewall and that will ultimately result in consuming slightly more CPU cycles.
hocuspocus 5y ago
> I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills! Or they work at Google and don't really have to care. Electricity is not particularly cheap in Switzerland, but not particularly expensive either (nothing like Germany for instance). If running a home lab is your hobby, why not. There are plenty of hobbies that are a lot more expensive.
- ianai 5y ago
  The machine's clearly massive overkill for routing. Another commenter points out it typically runs around 50w - and the OP says they're also using it as a server in this thread.
  - dijit 5y ago
    FWIW: raspberry pis (the 4 series) sucks in 15w which is why it’s so bloody difficult to power them through standard USB power adapters (which go up to 12w). So, not hundreds of times more power hungry, but definitely 2-3x
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      yep, which makes them a pain in the ass to efficiently cool down without active cooling (=fans)
      - larschdk 5y ago
        My passively cooled RPi4 with 8GiB RAM + 1GiB/USB ethernet dongle working as a 1Gb router never goes above 50 degrees C (all-metal case from aliexpress).
    - geerlingguy 5y ago
      Just to note that's peak power consumption. They idle between 1-4W, or if you're running a PoE HAT, 4-6W.
      - 5y ago
great-potential 5y ago
I think if the OP uses this only as a router it is indeed a waste of power. What I would probably do is also use it as nas/workstation by using virtualization, SR-IOV is now pretty standard on these cards.
- secure 5y ago
  I’m using the machine also as a server, so it replaces 2 existing devices. In terms of power consumption, it’s likely only a small increase, if at all.
  - Datagenerator 5y ago
    Also, the user can use his freedom to build and do whatever wished for. This tone of you shouldn't do this because some COTS is available sounds very commercially driven. People have the power to create another Google, we are not powerless.
  - ianai 5y ago
    My only rub with that is - shouldn't the router be only a router from a security perspective? Definitely combining servers for home use does make sense though.
    - secure 5y ago
      Ideally yes. But with the resources needed for 25 Gbps, not using one machine for multiple purposes seems wasteful. The server only stores publically available data, though, so not a big deal from a security perspective.
      - ianai 5y ago
        What do you mean by resources required? expansion ports on the mb?
    - great-potential 5y ago
      Yeah running your nas-bittorrent/firewall-router on the same OS is clearly not something I would do, especially that now you can use somrthing like proxmox for example and virtualize your pfsense/opnsense instance.
IgorPartola 5y ago
What kind of light bulb? :) A typical consumer router will take up something like 5-10 watts. A PC will suck in 20-50. Remember that the PC will be a lot more powerful so it’ll spend most of its time with low CPU usage. Say the worst case scenario: 45W difference. 45W * (24 * 30) / 1000 = 32.4 kW*h/month. At $0.10 kWh rate that’s $3.24/month, less than a cup of Starbucks coffee.
- mixermachine 5y ago
  Add HDDs and 10 GBit/s hardware and you surely reach 60 watts or more idling. Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle). A NUC or other Laptop hardware on the other hand would be OK to run. Maybe SSD raids are (financially) feasible for everyday files in the near future. You are lucky to pay only $0.10. Here (Germany) I pay 0.30 Euro per kW/h. About $0.36 dollars. I turned off my home NAS a few months back and partially switched to VPS services (also because of the better connection).
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    > Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle). Yes, but switching to newer, more efficient hardware is not free, so you need to factor this in when considering a switch. Also, in case you don't only care about your wallet but also environmental impact it's getting even more complicated, since manufacturing your new shiny toy definitely is polluting the environment somewhere in Asia, gets shipped via ship burning horribly dirty fuel in international waters etc. If you don't have any use for the old hardware, chances are it will end up burning on some open field somewhere in Africa after local recyclers already extracted the good stuff...
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "your new shiny toy definitely is polluting the environment somewhere in Asia" Thats true whether I use dropbox or my own server
- foolmeonce 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
melling 5y ago
He claims one of his goals is to be power efficient “The PC consumes about 48W of power when idle (only management …” https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 “ How much electricity does an American home use? In 2019, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,649 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of about 877 kWh per month”
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  Ok so what am I missing here? In Germany a typical four person household is 2000kwh a year. Surely air conditioning can't make up for such a difference? Everybody already switched to electric cars?
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    I don't have the numbers, but air conditioning can suck up a LOT of energy. I'm pretty sure air conditioning would be (in our household) the single biggest energy user.
  - tzs 5y ago
    That's about 170 kWh/month. I'm in the US and use around 450-500 kWh/month in the summer, which is my time of minimal use because it is warm enough to not need heating and usually not so warm as to need air conditioning. I'm curious why such a big difference. Here's what I'm using in a household of one. 1. Kitchen appliances: Fridge, microwave, toaster, oven, dishwasher. The first three are used daily. The oven and dishwasher once per week. I'll also occasionally use a bread machine and an electric kettle, maybe a couple times a month. 2. Washing machine and dryer. 4-6 times per month. 3. A 2017 27" iMac, a Raspberry Pi 3, cable modem, TP-Link A7 router, and two TP-Link SG108E switches. A USB hub and a case for a couple external SSDs. An external monitor. 4. A 55" LCD TV which is used a couple hours a day, and an A/V receiver which is always on but usually idle. A couple streaming boxes (Fire Stick 4K, Xfinity Flex). 5. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Surface Pro 4 chargers charging those devices. 6. Indoor lighting. It is almost all LED. The only exceptions are the lights in the fridge and dryer, one bulb each in the attic and crawl space that I forgot about when switching to LED. 7. An outdoor security light in back that is on overnight. I'm not sure about its power consumption, but these are typically under 100 W, which would be 24 kWh/month during the summer. (I'm a bit puzzled by that light. I'm still using the same bulb that was there when I bought the house, giving the bulb on "on" time since I've owned it of around 56000 hours. That's quite a bit longer than expected for every kind of light bulb that I can think of that this might be. Only LED should approach that and definitely is not LED). 8. Well pump and water heater. The well pump runs maybe a couple times a day for maybe 5 minutes at a time, and would account for at most a few kWh/month. I know the water heater is a beast--but I think it only runs a little more frequently than once a day. 9. A couple box fans in windows at night to blow out hot air. They are 50 W each. Maybe 50 kWh/month. 10. Miscellaneous. Charger for rechargeable AA and AAA NiMH batteries. Electric toothbrush. A Google Home Mini as a kitchen timer. An Echo Dot to control lights. a Hue hub for the lights. Charger for the batteries for some cordless tools (drill, string trimmer, hedge trimmer) that are all used rarely.
FpUser 5y ago
>"I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7" Some people simply run business from home and it is legitimate business expense. For example in Toronto server consuming 200 Watt 24x7 comes to about $20/month. Not much to dwell about if you are making money as a business.
easygenes 5y ago
I have a computer in a room that’s generally otherwise too cold… so all that power is just useful heat dumped into the room.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  If you pay a lot for electricity, you could get heat cheaper with a heat pump, gas furnace, or simply adding insulation on the roof/walls so any heat you do add lasts longer.
  - varjag 5y ago
    Re-insulating a house is a substantial cost that can take a decade to pay back in utility bills.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      Yet spending $6 on draught excluders to keep the wind out can pay back in just a day or two. It all depends on your baseline...
- midasuni 5y ago
  Albeit not as efficient as say a heat pump
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    Significantly cheaper though.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Cheaper to buy, but not to run
    - easygenes 5y ago
      Commodity window-mount heat pumps which run off household power outlets can be had for a few hundred dollars, and are good for a minimum of a couple kilowatts of heat output. Any computing solution which dumps a couple kilowatts of heat and didn’t fall off a truck would probably cost more than that. Computers are fairly efficient heaters, but they’re a lot more expensive than heaters.
rzzzt 5y ago
I do remember a "smart NIC" making its rounds in the news a few years ago -- although "few" in this case might be >10. It was essentially a low-power machine in itself (with no Raspberry Pis in sight yet) that could finish an HTTP download or receive e-mails without waking up the host computer. But that's more high-level than the buffering/relaying of packets you are thinking of. Edit: a bit weird, I wrote a very similar comment a year ago about this item. Now I feel slightly compelled to find the news source for it...
- rasz 5y ago
  asus "killer nic", almost pure marketing wankery with little benefit https://www.pcgamer.com/motherboards-with-killer-network-adapters-arent-worth-your-money/ https://www.pcgamer.com/motherboards-with-killer-network-ada...
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    "Application offloading" was one of the terms I tried when searching for it, and got this as a result - not the same thing, but similar: https://www.academia.edu/10225597/Putting_it_on_the_NIC_A_case_study_on_application_offloading_to_a_network_interface_card_NIC https://www.academia.edu/10225597/Putting_it_on_the_NIC_A_ca...
    - rasz 5y ago
      https://pcper.com/2007/03/bigfoot-networks-killer-nic-k1-and-fna-bit-torrent-client-review/6/ https://pcper.com/2007/03/bigfoot-networks-killer-nic-k1-and...
teekert 5y ago
My home server is about 70W, meaning about 150€ a year (~0.20 eur/kWH). So about 12€ a month. For one of my biggest hobbies. It’s fun, but it also runs WireGuard, 3 NextCloud installs, Home Assistant and Mosquitto, 2 MineCraft servers, a FoundryVTT instance, samba, sabnzbd, Unify Controller, an Nginx static site, LibreSpeed, VaultWarden and soon a Django site. Oh and a virtual desktop (vnc) I can always leave running with stuff open. Do I need all of that? Meh, but it’s not bad value for money-wise IMHO. Perhaps mostly because I just enjoy it. Edit: of course the thing itself was also quite expensive but not much more than a decent NAS which I think is a must for many people anyway.
- binkHN 5y ago
  > but it also runs ... MineCraft servers At least you have your priorities straight :P !
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > (~0.20 eur/kWH) Are such high electricity prices common in Europe? That's higher than it is in 49 of the 50 US states (assuming 0.20 EUR = 0.24 USD, and with Hawaii being the exception).
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    In Western Europe at least this is quite common. Mostly because politicians have discovered this as a great tax resource.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    Electricity in the EU is really really expensive. That person is actually paying below average rates.
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    That's cheaper than California!
  - mixermachine 5y ago
    0.30 Euro per kW/h in Germany
gravypod 5y ago
You can dynamically turn on and off things with MaaS and monitor power though most UPSs.
rasz 5y ago
let me introduce you to "My PlayHouse" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhwj_aCEYc0&list=PLS2odYzlaogJuAvN2dGRz-oNuBSA27UHp&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhwj_aCEYc0&list=PLS2odYzlao... fun stuff starts at 5:00
iforgotpassword 5y ago
> who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. Maybe they need it? A router isn't a home server. But even if, why do you keep your power efficient router running 24/7? You could turn it off when you're not home to save even more energy. > a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power Maybe do some research before claims like these. He states this pc idles at 48W. Please show me a router capable of handling 25gbit/s that consumes 0,5W at idle. > how would you build a "something" that monitors the network for packets sent to powered-off machines, then somehow caches the request, powers the destination machine On, and finally lets the request continue to its target? That's what "wake on LAN" is for.
- yakubin 5y ago
  > But even if, why do you keep your power efficient router running 24/7? You could turn it off when you're not home to save even more energy. You jest, but I turn off my router for the night and each time I leave home for more than a day. Not just router to be exact, everything that's connected to a power strip goes down, as I turn off all the power strips. (Not OP.)
  - 83457 5y ago
    Why not just go all in and shut off at breakers?
    - oriolid 5y ago
      Fridge.
      - herewego 5y ago
        Then don’t flip the fridge breaker.
        detaro 5y ago
        Plenty places don't have a separate breaker for that.
naikrovek 5y ago
Have you measured how much electricity a computer doing routing consumes? I bet it's a lot less than you think. Also measure how much a good, high-bandwidth router uses. I bet that is a lot more than you think. the "why do this" question for me comes about entirely because of the continual manual intervention that is needed for solutions like this. just not worth it, to me.
- jacoblambda 5y ago
  I mean I have and my router is on average drawing around 15W but it also isn't remotely close to being able to hit 25Gbps. I don't think 50W (apparently the draw of this router) is unrealistic for a 25Gbps router by any means.
unixhero 5y ago
Maybe they have money and they find that spending money on homelabbing is worth the effort. And really it isn't THAT expensive either. I for one don't bat an eye on my USD200 yearly homelab electricity cost. Of course if one wishes to perfectly optimize everything then having a homelab might well wasteful.
- sponaugle 5y ago
  Indeed every case is unique. My home lab runs about ~4kw all the time, which end up being about 2.8mWh/month. Here in Oregon that ends up costing $340/month. This is a brand new house, and as soon as I get permits approved I'm adding 21kw of solar which will help offset that.
tyingq 5y ago
His starting requirements include one pci card for 25gb and another for 4 port 10gb. I don't think there's any low power way to do that. Any motherboard with enough slots, CPU power, and PCI lanes to handle all that aggregate bandwidth isn't going to be low power setup. If you underpowered it, then you might as well back off of 25gb/10gb. So it's not really a home server. It just happens to be in a home.
mirekrusin 5y ago
45W is not really "sucking up electricity", it's really nothing compared to other things in the house. I don't think PC is consuming 100x more as well, less than 10x and the same or nothing when not used.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I put together a tiny server with power consumption in mind, it consumes 15W and has i3-8100, that's enough to run just about everything I can be bothered to run: kubernetes, owncast, homeassistant, pihole, etc. Generally, a laptop or Intel Nuc will give you a good low power server, much better platforms for development than a PI. Then if you decide you need a RAID array, that's a different ball game.
ab3rC1te 5y ago
You know you could just go buy an alternator and rig yourself up your own infinite power supply. Depends on the Amps of the alternator.
vbezhenar 5y ago
> In fact this is a nice place to ask: how would you build a "something" that monitors the network for packets sent to powered-off machines, then somehow caches the request, powers the destination machine On, and finally lets the request continue to its target? Has this been tackled anywhere? There must be tons of people wanting a homeserver but living in places where electricity has a considerable cost... IP protocol does not guarantee delivery. So you don't have to cache request. Just power on the machine, client will retry sending the packets until the machine is powered on and can respond. Just make sure that there's no gap between networking available and http server is still starting on.
- secure 5y ago
  I have built such a gateway for SSH: it accepts the connection, powers on the target machine if needed, then forwards traffic. https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/blob/master/wolgw/wolgw.go https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/blob/master/wolg... The advantage over just catching any packets is that an SSH connection is authorized, so less noisy in terms of undesired wakeups.
  - secabeen 5y ago
    Apple has this. It's called Boujour sleep proxy, and it allows a always-on device like a Airport or AppleTV to claim the IP address of a sleeping Mac, waking it with a WoL packet when traffic for that device comes in. It's probably pretty useful, but is annoying on a managed network, as it spams my arpwatch system every time the IP is transferred between devices.
johndhowell 5y ago
I personally run two servers with a NAS 24/7 acting as media, ftp, and web server. My electric bill maybe increased a couple of dollars, but otherwise I haven't really noticed any significant increase. I'm based in the southern US
tibbon 5y ago
I’ve got a handful of computers running in a rack at home. Their total power? Around 400w. I also have a dehumidifier running all the time in the basement. It’s power usage is 500w. No one bats and eye at a heater or dehumidifier, but a computer and people get worried
- sponaugle 5y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. It is interesting to look at total power usage and power usage by device. I'm using IotaWatts to monitor every individual circuit in my house (over 200 of them), and it is easy to miss things that add up. With computers it is quite amazing the difference in power load based on cpu/disk load. When I run my PI calculator (which not only pegs CPU, but hits my SAN very hard) I see over a 1kw difference in my homelab power draw.
  - 542458 5y ago
    Sorry, your house has 200 circuits? Is every outlet on its own circuit or something? Maybe I’m biased because my house is old, but I’ve never heard of having that much copper in the walls.
    - sponaugle 5y ago
      A few different things drove up the circuit count: (1) It is a large house ( over 10,000 sq ft ). (2) There are two power paths throughout the entire house - generator and non generator, and most panel locations have two panels for that reason. (3) There are two incoming services from the power company - A standard 400 amp service, and a second 200 amp TOU (Time of use) circuit that is primary used for EV charging. And there are 4 EV chargers, two in the upper garage and two in the lower garage. (4) There is a 16kVa UPS and circuits behind that UPS that go to a few places in the house including the server room. Lots of cool pictures and info here: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-side-shop-portland.409988/ https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-s...
      - 5y ago
adrian_b 5y ago
"probably consuming like x100 the power" is greatly exaggerated. A typical PC might have an idle power consumption of less than 50 W, while a very small computer with ARM little cores might have an idle power of 2 ... 3 W, so at most the power consumption ratio would be 20. However even that is not realistic because a computer or appliance with less than 3 W power consumption will not be able to route 10 Gb/s or faster links and it will struggle even with multiple 1 Gb/s ports. A dedicated router appliance able to route 10 Gb/s or faster links will probably have an idle power of around 10 W or even more. For routing only 1 Gb/s links, you can use among the standard PC's a NUC-like model, which will have an idle power consumption between 5 W and 10 W, quite close to a dedicated appliance. This is actually what I am using for my own Internet router/firewall (which also runs many other services, e.g. DNS server and proxy, NTP, e-mail, HTTP server and proxy etc.) with 1 external 1 Gb/s port and 4 internal 1 Gb/s ports (4 of the 5 ports are made with USB to Ethernet adapters). Some of the more recent NUC or similar computers have multiple Thunderbolt ports or 10 Gb/s USB ports, so those can be used to route multiple 10 Gb/s links (using Ethernet adapters), with an idle power of around 10 W, similar to any equivalent commercial routers. For 25 Gb/s Ethernet links, a commercial router is unlikely to be much cheaper or to consume much less than a standard PC.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  SFP requires less energy than RJ45, only 0.7W/port. The MikroTik 4-port CRS305-1G-4S+IN draws 10-18W.
  - bcrl 5y ago
    That's not entirely true. SFP power consumption depends on the type of SFP. A 10Gbps DWDM SFP+ might draw 1.8W of power. The why for this is actually quite interesting: the lasers used in DWDM SFPs have much more stringent requirements for temperature stability to ensure the light emitted doesn't drift out of spec. In order to achieve that temperature stability, they use a built in peltier to pump heat away from the laser and control the temperature. They're quite the marvel of modern engineering!
    - 5y ago
Zenst 5y ago
For some perspective, this is a nice list of many household appliances and their power usage: https://www.daftlogic.com/information-appliance-power-consumption.htm https://www.daftlogic.com/information-appliance-power-consum...
michael1999 5y ago
Yes. In fact, apple’s AirPort Extreme units do that for macs in the house though their zeroconf networking. On sleep, the airport borrows the address and ARPs it. On traffic to that IP, it holds it, sends a special wake packet to the sleeping nic, and then re-sends the packet to with the real MAC, and the waking machine picks it up.
flatiron 5y ago
I run just plex and pi hole. Money I save with plex that I don’t need a million different services and having no ads at home is well worth the price. One day my friends went out and I couldn’t go. They got all drunk and shared how much they rely on my plex and by the time I woke up I had close to $1k in PayPal and a note that said “for an upgrade and your time” so honestly I probably making out on the deal. Went from a haswell pentium to a ninth gen i3. 8 gigs to 16. SSD for the root drive. 8 TB staging server before going to google drive. $20 a month for unlimited google drive is way more than the power to run the server. But I have about 80TB on there. Can’t store that for less than $20 a month no matter how you slice it.
- j1elo 5y ago
  I've been looking at the offers of big providers and the average seems to be pretty much standard: 2 TB for $10/month. All across Dropbox, Google, Apple, even Microsoft (the individual plan) are in the same ballpark.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    Google drive enterprise for $20 a month for unlimited is the best I’ve found. Rclone and encfs to mount and send the content. Almost 0 issues.
    - alternize 5y ago
      sounds intriguing for backup purposes. I was not able to find this pricing online (without contacting sales), would you have a link for this?
  - _huayra_ 5y ago
    I've been using pcloud which has a lifetime plan which is a pretty good deal. I recommend waiting until black friday or August 1 (Swiss national day; they're a CH-based company) when they severely drop the price.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    I’ve read that it costs them $2 to store a single TB a month. Which makes sense. $4 -> $10 is a reasonable markup. I store 80 TB for $20. They lose money on me.
setBoolean 5y ago
I have a HomeKit power plug that is able to measure the power usage. It sits before most of my living room devices including: 2x OG HomePods (Standby) - 55" Philips OLED (Standby) - Hue Bridge 2. Gen (Running) - ATV 4K 1.Gen (Standby) - Netatmo Weather Station (Running) - Linksys MR8300 OpenWrt 21.02 (Running) - Home Server (i5-6600, 16GB DDR3, 2x 256GB 850 EVO, 1Gb USB3 Ethernet Adapter as second NIC, Running) Reading with all devices combined is 35-40W.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
antonzabirko 5y ago
I mean if it's a problem just solve it. Yes, the folks in texas who have to pay 10x for electricity probably shouldn't get in if thuy can't afford it. Also, get solar/wind if you are concerned aboit the impact.
swiley 5y ago
Many of these things are really competing with a $20/mo VPS so a full PC that's on 24/7 is still cheaper. Yes you could go further: use portable slim apps that fit on ARM SBCs but then you have to re-do your server config and learn a new app. Plus, at least for me, my PC is on 24/7 anyway.
specialist 5y ago
Why not? Every one needs a hobby. Another benefit to Stapelberg's noodling is setting expectations. Imagine you're bootstrapping a municipal ISP or mid-sized org. Dealing with vendors and products for the first time. What's reasonable? Who knows? Having these projects be a reality check is awesome.
zbrozek 5y ago
I have a symmetric 10 gbps connection at home. I have an EPYC machine that plays host to a number of virtual machine guests for various tasks. One of them is running opnsense to be my router. It's not fast enough to route at line speed, but it's close enough that I don't care. A consumer router or a pi or something would be far slower, and I would start to care. Having a tolerably powerful computer doing this means that it's also my web server for several sites, stores local backups and handles offsite backups, acts as my print server, and hosts a Windows virtual machine for using proprietary software (e.g., for my label printers or firmware updates for random widgets like my Lutron light system). Quiescent appears to be something in the neighborhood of 40 watts. It's not nothing, but it's acceptable, especially for the utility. I don't pay for a VPS because I have the bandwidth and the capacity to self-host everything I want. I spend $8/mo in electricity to run that machine, and that will drop to zero when my solar array and battery become functional. If the power consumption were 5x worse I would probably not have gone this route.
hatware 5y ago
I have decade old hardware that is certainly inefficient, but my services hosted have taught me so much it's not even worth the comparison. Yes, electricity is cheap in America but we all choose to spend money on our hobbies as we please. I'll bet there's a few nitpicks with your hobbies where you trade a lot of time/money/something that I don't necessarily understand. And that's okay.
allenrb 5y ago
When I was younger, 100W was a light bulb. We’ve come a long way. :-)
juancb 5y ago
I've used managed power strips for data center applications in the past. The strips have individually addressable power ports and a web interface, telnet, as well as SNMP support. They've been around for decades and are the solution to your problem of needing to remotely manage the power state of power hungry devices. If you set your servers to always power on after power is restored you can control them with that device. There's also Wake On Lan (WoL) support in a lot of systems, where you can use a correctly crafted "magic frame" to wake up any machine that received it.
harikb 5y ago
There is such a thing as wake-on-lan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN
AdrianB1 5y ago
My home server using a very similar configuration (same CPU, a lot less potent network) is what enables me to work from home, making a living, so the cost of electricity is compensated by the gas saved on commuting. I am also in process of adding solar to my house, covering a lot more than this server. If people use old servers in the kilowatt range consumption for fooling around having a server in the basement is questionable, building something with low power in mind is nothing to complain about.
cptskippy 5y ago
My home has a 0.5-0.7kWh idle load, with the varying 0.2kWh being from the refrigerators cycling. I tried shutting down my NAS and Home server and it was less than 0.1kWh. I'm at a loss to explain exactly what is drawing 0.4kWh of power but my neighbor has a similar load on his. I'm suspecting all of the fancy and useless motion/astro light switches installed are partially to blame but there's no easy way to verify that.
cortesoft 5y ago
My solar panels on my roof generate about 10KW/h more than I use. I can bank credits with the grid, but can never cash them out, so electricity is basically free for me.
f3d46600-b66e 5y ago
My Netgear access point consumes 7-8watts. My home server, with 2*12TB drives, 2*3TB, and 1nvme, which also acts as NVR (for POE cameras), recording 24x7, and which also acts as owncloud server (and few other things) consumes 40-50watts (and it includes a 10gbps SFP+ fiber). It also includes a wireless card and acts as an access point. It also runs a few VMS, continuous integration server, pihole and other stuff. This is not x100, it's x7 times. And the utility is much much higher. Before, i was using amd Apu, and it consumed 20-30 watts, but did not support AES-NI, which made the disk access limited to 60MB/s :-( It's way cheaper to run everything at home than paying for the cloud, even if u include electricity cost. It's about $50/year for electricity (1 watt 24/7 =~ $1 per year)
Aeolun 5y ago
It costs about the same as a Netflix subscription? The people that do this see it as a hobby, so it’s worth spending some money on.
insulanus 5y ago
A Netgear Nighthawk R7000 idles at 8W, max 34W. That will get you 1 Gigabit. Bleeding edge CPUs from Intel and AMD do guzzle power when run at full load, but they also improve in power per IPS, and have added dynamic underclocking, so they also run Compare the TDP of a Pentium 4 from 2000 to a Ryzen 5 3600 or an i7 7700K (These TDPs are supposedly max power output, but take them with a nugget of salt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_... Gotta update that power intuition!

by j1elo 5y ago

philjohn 5y ago

There is a middle ground - either an Intel Atom or Intel Celeron based server - typically use around 10w and you still get niceties like SATA and even PCIe

easygenes 5y ago
Also plenty of slightly more capable laptop class SKUs that are in this ballpark.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  Can you still find "desktop" motherboards to go with them? A long time ago, I remember there being desktop MBs for the Pentium M.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    For an always running thing, choosing a laptop motherboard is a nice way to guarantee all the power saving features will work properly. Most desktop motherboards won't allow the PCI express bus to sleep for example, using an extra ~4 watts, $8 per year in eco-friendly countries. Across the ~10 years your NAS will probably sit in a cupboard, that's $80, which isn't an awful lot, but probably would have let you buy a bigger SSD or hard drive which would have had more utility.
    - vladvasiliu 5y ago
      That's true, but then again I wouldn't be comfortable with a single-disk NAS... However, for running random VMs, etc, I think a laptop is quite a good proposition.
ttsiodras 5y ago
If you are OK with external USB drives, I did just that with my Atomic PI [1] (Atom-based, 35$ SBC, 3.5W idle, running Debian on its internal EMMC, with two external USB drivers in ZFS-mirror configuration). [1] https://www.thanassis.space/atomicpi.html https://www.thanassis.space/atomicpi.html
- philjohn 5y ago
  You can also get rackmount servers in 1U format with Atom CPU's that support 4 3.5" drives, e.g. https://www.broadberry.co.uk/intel-atom-rackmount-servers/cyberserve-atom-104s https://www.broadberry.co.uk/intel-atom-rackmount-servers/cy...

baybal2 5y ago

What a lot of other people don't realise: - There is no such thing as a 25gbps home router. What's currently on the market is a very serious overkill ever for 10gbps.

great-potential 5y ago
In terms of CPU it is not totally overkill if you're using an IPS/IDS, bare in mind you'll also be disabling most of the network card offloading in a full fledged firewall and that will ultimately result in consuming slightly more CPU cycles.

hocuspocus 5y ago

> I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills! Or they work at Google and don't really have to care. Electricity is not particularly cheap in Switzerland, but not particularly expensive either (nothing like Germany for instance). If running a home lab is your hobby, why not. There are plenty of hobbies that are a lot more expensive.

ianai 5y ago
The machine's clearly massive overkill for routing. Another commenter points out it typically runs around 50w - and the OP says they're also using it as a server in this thread.
- dijit 5y ago
  FWIW: raspberry pis (the 4 series) sucks in 15w which is why it’s so bloody difficult to power them through standard USB power adapters (which go up to 12w). So, not hundreds of times more power hungry, but definitely 2-3x
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    yep, which makes them a pain in the ass to efficiently cool down without active cooling (=fans)
    - larschdk 5y ago
      My passively cooled RPi4 with 8GiB RAM + 1GiB/USB ethernet dongle working as a 1Gb router never goes above 50 degrees C (all-metal case from aliexpress).
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    Just to note that's peak power consumption. They idle between 1-4W, or if you're running a PoE HAT, 4-6W.
    - 5y ago

great-potential 5y ago

I think if the OP uses this only as a router it is indeed a waste of power. What I would probably do is also use it as nas/workstation by using virtualization, SR-IOV is now pretty standard on these cards.

secure 5y ago
I’m using the machine also as a server, so it replaces 2 existing devices. In terms of power consumption, it’s likely only a small increase, if at all.
- Datagenerator 5y ago
  Also, the user can use his freedom to build and do whatever wished for. This tone of you shouldn't do this because some COTS is available sounds very commercially driven. People have the power to create another Google, we are not powerless.
- ianai 5y ago
  My only rub with that is - shouldn't the router be only a router from a security perspective? Definitely combining servers for home use does make sense though.
  - secure 5y ago
    Ideally yes. But with the resources needed for 25 Gbps, not using one machine for multiple purposes seems wasteful. The server only stores publically available data, though, so not a big deal from a security perspective.
    - ianai 5y ago
      What do you mean by resources required? expansion ports on the mb?
  - great-potential 5y ago
    Yeah running your nas-bittorrent/firewall-router on the same OS is clearly not something I would do, especially that now you can use somrthing like proxmox for example and virtualize your pfsense/opnsense instance.

IgorPartola 5y ago

What kind of light bulb? :) A typical consumer router will take up something like 5-10 watts. A PC will suck in 20-50. Remember that the PC will be a lot more powerful so it’ll spend most of its time with low CPU usage. Say the worst case scenario: 45W difference. 45W * (24 * 30) / 1000 = 32.4 kW*h/month. At $0.10 kWh rate that’s $3.24/month, less than a cup of Starbucks coffee.

mixermachine 5y ago
Add HDDs and 10 GBit/s hardware and you surely reach 60 watts or more idling. Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle). A NUC or other Laptop hardware on the other hand would be OK to run. Maybe SSD raids are (financially) feasible for everyday files in the near future. You are lucky to pay only $0.10. Here (Germany) I pay 0.30 Euro per kW/h. About $0.36 dollars. I turned off my home NAS a few months back and partially switched to VPS services (also because of the better connection).
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  > Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle). Yes, but switching to newer, more efficient hardware is not free, so you need to factor this in when considering a switch. Also, in case you don't only care about your wallet but also environmental impact it's getting even more complicated, since manufacturing your new shiny toy definitely is polluting the environment somewhere in Asia, gets shipped via ship burning horribly dirty fuel in international waters etc. If you don't have any use for the old hardware, chances are it will end up burning on some open field somewhere in Africa after local recyclers already extracted the good stuff...
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "your new shiny toy definitely is polluting the environment somewhere in Asia" Thats true whether I use dropbox or my own server
foolmeonce 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

melling 5y ago

He claims one of his goals is to be power efficient “The PC consumes about 48W of power when idle (only management …” https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 “ How much electricity does an American home use? In 2019, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,649 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of about 877 kWh per month”

iforgotpassword 5y ago
Ok so what am I missing here? In Germany a typical four person household is 2000kwh a year. Surely air conditioning can't make up for such a difference? Everybody already switched to electric cars?
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  I don't have the numbers, but air conditioning can suck up a LOT of energy. I'm pretty sure air conditioning would be (in our household) the single biggest energy user.
- tzs 5y ago
  That's about 170 kWh/month. I'm in the US and use around 450-500 kWh/month in the summer, which is my time of minimal use because it is warm enough to not need heating and usually not so warm as to need air conditioning. I'm curious why such a big difference. Here's what I'm using in a household of one. 1. Kitchen appliances: Fridge, microwave, toaster, oven, dishwasher. The first three are used daily. The oven and dishwasher once per week. I'll also occasionally use a bread machine and an electric kettle, maybe a couple times a month. 2. Washing machine and dryer. 4-6 times per month. 3. A 2017 27" iMac, a Raspberry Pi 3, cable modem, TP-Link A7 router, and two TP-Link SG108E switches. A USB hub and a case for a couple external SSDs. An external monitor. 4. A 55" LCD TV which is used a couple hours a day, and an A/V receiver which is always on but usually idle. A couple streaming boxes (Fire Stick 4K, Xfinity Flex). 5. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Surface Pro 4 chargers charging those devices. 6. Indoor lighting. It is almost all LED. The only exceptions are the lights in the fridge and dryer, one bulb each in the attic and crawl space that I forgot about when switching to LED. 7. An outdoor security light in back that is on overnight. I'm not sure about its power consumption, but these are typically under 100 W, which would be 24 kWh/month during the summer. (I'm a bit puzzled by that light. I'm still using the same bulb that was there when I bought the house, giving the bulb on "on" time since I've owned it of around 56000 hours. That's quite a bit longer than expected for every kind of light bulb that I can think of that this might be. Only LED should approach that and definitely is not LED). 8. Well pump and water heater. The well pump runs maybe a couple times a day for maybe 5 minutes at a time, and would account for at most a few kWh/month. I know the water heater is a beast--but I think it only runs a little more frequently than once a day. 9. A couple box fans in windows at night to blow out hot air. They are 50 W each. Maybe 50 kWh/month. 10. Miscellaneous. Charger for rechargeable AA and AAA NiMH batteries. Electric toothbrush. A Google Home Mini as a kitchen timer. An Echo Dot to control lights. a Hue hub for the lights. Charger for the batteries for some cordless tools (drill, string trimmer, hedge trimmer) that are all used rarely.

FpUser 5y ago

>"I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7" Some people simply run business from home and it is legitimate business expense. For example in Toronto server consuming 200 Watt 24x7 comes to about $20/month. Not much to dwell about if you are making money as a business.

easygenes 5y ago

I have a computer in a room that’s generally otherwise too cold… so all that power is just useful heat dumped into the room.

londons_explore 5y ago
If you pay a lot for electricity, you could get heat cheaper with a heat pump, gas furnace, or simply adding insulation on the roof/walls so any heat you do add lasts longer.
- varjag 5y ago
  Re-insulating a house is a substantial cost that can take a decade to pay back in utility bills.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Yet spending $6 on draught excluders to keep the wind out can pay back in just a day or two. It all depends on your baseline...
midasuni 5y ago
Albeit not as efficient as say a heat pump
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Significantly cheaper though.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Cheaper to buy, but not to run
  - easygenes 5y ago
    Commodity window-mount heat pumps which run off household power outlets can be had for a few hundred dollars, and are good for a minimum of a couple kilowatts of heat output. Any computing solution which dumps a couple kilowatts of heat and didn’t fall off a truck would probably cost more than that. Computers are fairly efficient heaters, but they’re a lot more expensive than heaters.

rzzzt 5y ago

I do remember a "smart NIC" making its rounds in the news a few years ago -- although "few" in this case might be >10. It was essentially a low-power machine in itself (with no Raspberry Pis in sight yet) that could finish an HTTP download or receive e-mails without waking up the host computer. But that's more high-level than the buffering/relaying of packets you are thinking of. Edit: a bit weird, I wrote a very similar comment a year ago about this item. Now I feel slightly compelled to find the news source for it...

rasz 5y ago
asus "killer nic", almost pure marketing wankery with little benefit https://www.pcgamer.com/motherboards-with-killer-network-adapters-arent-worth-your-money/ https://www.pcgamer.com/motherboards-with-killer-network-ada...
- rzzzt 5y ago
  "Application offloading" was one of the terms I tried when searching for it, and got this as a result - not the same thing, but similar: https://www.academia.edu/10225597/Putting_it_on_the_NIC_A_case_study_on_application_offloading_to_a_network_interface_card_NIC https://www.academia.edu/10225597/Putting_it_on_the_NIC_A_ca...
  - rasz 5y ago
    https://pcper.com/2007/03/bigfoot-networks-killer-nic-k1-and-fna-bit-torrent-client-review/6/ https://pcper.com/2007/03/bigfoot-networks-killer-nic-k1-and...

teekert 5y ago

My home server is about 70W, meaning about 150€ a year (~0.20 eur/kWH). So about 12€ a month. For one of my biggest hobbies. It’s fun, but it also runs WireGuard, 3 NextCloud installs, Home Assistant and Mosquitto, 2 MineCraft servers, a FoundryVTT instance, samba, sabnzbd, Unify Controller, an Nginx static site, LibreSpeed, VaultWarden and soon a Django site. Oh and a virtual desktop (vnc) I can always leave running with stuff open. Do I need all of that? Meh, but it’s not bad value for money-wise IMHO. Perhaps mostly because I just enjoy it. Edit: of course the thing itself was also quite expensive but not much more than a decent NAS which I think is a must for many people anyway.

binkHN 5y ago
> but it also runs ... MineCraft servers At least you have your priorities straight :P !
josephcsible 5y ago
> (~0.20 eur/kWH) Are such high electricity prices common in Europe? That's higher than it is in 49 of the 50 US states (assuming 0.20 EUR = 0.24 USD, and with Hawaii being the exception).
- cinntaile 5y ago
  In Western Europe at least this is quite common. Mostly because politicians have discovered this as a great tax resource.
- selectodude 5y ago
  Electricity in the EU is really really expensive. That person is actually paying below average rates.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  That's cheaper than California!
- mixermachine 5y ago
  0.30 Euro per kW/h in Germany

gravypod 5y ago

You can dynamically turn on and off things with MaaS and monitor power though most UPSs.

rasz 5y ago

let me introduce you to "My PlayHouse" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhwj_aCEYc0&list=PLS2odYzlaogJuAvN2dGRz-oNuBSA27UHp&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhwj_aCEYc0&list=PLS2odYzlao... fun stuff starts at 5:00

iforgotpassword 5y ago

> who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. Maybe they need it? A router isn't a home server. But even if, why do you keep your power efficient router running 24/7? You could turn it off when you're not home to save even more energy. > a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power Maybe do some research before claims like these. He states this pc idles at 48W. Please show me a router capable of handling 25gbit/s that consumes 0,5W at idle. > how would you build a "something" that monitors the network for packets sent to powered-off machines, then somehow caches the request, powers the destination machine On, and finally lets the request continue to its target? That's what "wake on LAN" is for.

yakubin 5y ago
> But even if, why do you keep your power efficient router running 24/7? You could turn it off when you're not home to save even more energy. You jest, but I turn off my router for the night and each time I leave home for more than a day. Not just router to be exact, everything that's connected to a power strip goes down, as I turn off all the power strips. (Not OP.)
- 83457 5y ago
  Why not just go all in and shut off at breakers?
  - oriolid 5y ago
    Fridge.
    - herewego 5y ago
      Then don’t flip the fridge breaker.
      - detaro 5y ago
        Plenty places don't have a separate breaker for that.

naikrovek 5y ago

Have you measured how much electricity a computer doing routing consumes? I bet it's a lot less than you think. Also measure how much a good, high-bandwidth router uses. I bet that is a lot more than you think. the "why do this" question for me comes about entirely because of the continual manual intervention that is needed for solutions like this. just not worth it, to me.

jacoblambda 5y ago
I mean I have and my router is on average drawing around 15W but it also isn't remotely close to being able to hit 25Gbps. I don't think 50W (apparently the draw of this router) is unrealistic for a 25Gbps router by any means.

unixhero 5y ago

Maybe they have money and they find that spending money on homelabbing is worth the effort. And really it isn't THAT expensive either. I for one don't bat an eye on my USD200 yearly homelab electricity cost. Of course if one wishes to perfectly optimize everything then having a homelab might well wasteful.

sponaugle 5y ago
Indeed every case is unique. My home lab runs about ~4kw all the time, which end up being about 2.8mWh/month. Here in Oregon that ends up costing $340/month. This is a brand new house, and as soon as I get permits approved I'm adding 21kw of solar which will help offset that.

tyingq 5y ago

His starting requirements include one pci card for 25gb and another for 4 port 10gb. I don't think there's any low power way to do that. Any motherboard with enough slots, CPU power, and PCI lanes to handle all that aggregate bandwidth isn't going to be low power setup. If you underpowered it, then you might as well back off of 25gb/10gb. So it's not really a home server. It just happens to be in a home.

mirekrusin 5y ago

45W is not really "sucking up electricity", it's really nothing compared to other things in the house. I don't think PC is consuming 100x more as well, less than 10x and the same or nothing when not used.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

I put together a tiny server with power consumption in mind, it consumes 15W and has i3-8100, that's enough to run just about everything I can be bothered to run: kubernetes, owncast, homeassistant, pihole, etc. Generally, a laptop or Intel Nuc will give you a good low power server, much better platforms for development than a PI. Then if you decide you need a RAID array, that's a different ball game.

ab3rC1te 5y ago

You know you could just go buy an alternator and rig yourself up your own infinite power supply. Depends on the Amps of the alternator.

vbezhenar 5y ago

> In fact this is a nice place to ask: how would you build a "something" that monitors the network for packets sent to powered-off machines, then somehow caches the request, powers the destination machine On, and finally lets the request continue to its target? Has this been tackled anywhere? There must be tons of people wanting a homeserver but living in places where electricity has a considerable cost... IP protocol does not guarantee delivery. So you don't have to cache request. Just power on the machine, client will retry sending the packets until the machine is powered on and can respond. Just make sure that there's no gap between networking available and http server is still starting on.

secure 5y ago
I have built such a gateway for SSH: it accepts the connection, powers on the target machine if needed, then forwards traffic. https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/blob/master/wolgw/wolgw.go https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/blob/master/wolg... The advantage over just catching any packets is that an SSH connection is authorized, so less noisy in terms of undesired wakeups.
- secabeen 5y ago
  Apple has this. It's called Boujour sleep proxy, and it allows a always-on device like a Airport or AppleTV to claim the IP address of a sleeping Mac, waking it with a WoL packet when traffic for that device comes in. It's probably pretty useful, but is annoying on a managed network, as it spams my arpwatch system every time the IP is transferred between devices.

johndhowell 5y ago

I personally run two servers with a NAS 24/7 acting as media, ftp, and web server. My electric bill maybe increased a couple of dollars, but otherwise I haven't really noticed any significant increase. I'm based in the southern US

tibbon 5y ago

I’ve got a handful of computers running in a rack at home. Their total power? Around 400w. I also have a dehumidifier running all the time in the basement. It’s power usage is 500w. No one bats and eye at a heater or dehumidifier, but a computer and people get worried

sponaugle 5y ago
I agree with your sentiment. It is interesting to look at total power usage and power usage by device. I'm using IotaWatts to monitor every individual circuit in my house (over 200 of them), and it is easy to miss things that add up. With computers it is quite amazing the difference in power load based on cpu/disk load. When I run my PI calculator (which not only pegs CPU, but hits my SAN very hard) I see over a 1kw difference in my homelab power draw.
- 542458 5y ago
  Sorry, your house has 200 circuits? Is every outlet on its own circuit or something? Maybe I’m biased because my house is old, but I’ve never heard of having that much copper in the walls.
  - sponaugle 5y ago
    A few different things drove up the circuit count: (1) It is a large house ( over 10,000 sq ft ). (2) There are two power paths throughout the entire house - generator and non generator, and most panel locations have two panels for that reason. (3) There are two incoming services from the power company - A standard 400 amp service, and a second 200 amp TOU (Time of use) circuit that is primary used for EV charging. And there are 4 EV chargers, two in the upper garage and two in the lower garage. (4) There is a 16kVa UPS and circuits behind that UPS that go to a few places in the house including the server room. Lots of cool pictures and info here: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-side-shop-portland.409988/ https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-s...
    - 5y ago

adrian_b 5y ago

"probably consuming like x100 the power" is greatly exaggerated. A typical PC might have an idle power consumption of less than 50 W, while a very small computer with ARM little cores might have an idle power of 2 ... 3 W, so at most the power consumption ratio would be 20. However even that is not realistic because a computer or appliance with less than 3 W power consumption will not be able to route 10 Gb/s or faster links and it will struggle even with multiple 1 Gb/s ports. A dedicated router appliance able to route 10 Gb/s or faster links will probably have an idle power of around 10 W or even more. For routing only 1 Gb/s links, you can use among the standard PC's a NUC-like model, which will have an idle power consumption between 5 W and 10 W, quite close to a dedicated appliance. This is actually what I am using for my own Internet router/firewall (which also runs many other services, e.g. DNS server and proxy, NTP, e-mail, HTTP server and proxy etc.) with 1 external 1 Gb/s port and 4 internal 1 Gb/s ports (4 of the 5 ports are made with USB to Ethernet adapters). Some of the more recent NUC or similar computers have multiple Thunderbolt ports or 10 Gb/s USB ports, so those can be used to route multiple 10 Gb/s links (using Ethernet adapters), with an idle power of around 10 W, similar to any equivalent commercial routers. For 25 Gb/s Ethernet links, a commercial router is unlikely to be much cheaper or to consume much less than a standard PC.

tomnipotent 5y ago
SFP requires less energy than RJ45, only 0.7W/port. The MikroTik 4-port CRS305-1G-4S+IN draws 10-18W.
- bcrl 5y ago
  That's not entirely true. SFP power consumption depends on the type of SFP. A 10Gbps DWDM SFP+ might draw 1.8W of power. The why for this is actually quite interesting: the lasers used in DWDM SFPs have much more stringent requirements for temperature stability to ensure the light emitted doesn't drift out of spec. In order to achieve that temperature stability, they use a built in peltier to pump heat away from the laser and control the temperature. They're quite the marvel of modern engineering!
  - 5y ago

Zenst 5y ago

For some perspective, this is a nice list of many household appliances and their power usage: https://www.daftlogic.com/information-appliance-power-consumption.htm https://www.daftlogic.com/information-appliance-power-consum...

michael1999 5y ago

Yes. In fact, apple’s AirPort Extreme units do that for macs in the house though their zeroconf networking. On sleep, the airport borrows the address and ARPs it. On traffic to that IP, it holds it, sends a special wake packet to the sleeping nic, and then re-sends the packet to with the real MAC, and the waking machine picks it up.

flatiron 5y ago

I run just plex and pi hole. Money I save with plex that I don’t need a million different services and having no ads at home is well worth the price. One day my friends went out and I couldn’t go. They got all drunk and shared how much they rely on my plex and by the time I woke up I had close to $1k in PayPal and a note that said “for an upgrade and your time” so honestly I probably making out on the deal. Went from a haswell pentium to a ninth gen i3. 8 gigs to 16. SSD for the root drive. 8 TB staging server before going to google drive. $20 a month for unlimited google drive is way more than the power to run the server. But I have about 80TB on there. Can’t store that for less than $20 a month no matter how you slice it.

j1elo 5y ago
I've been looking at the offers of big providers and the average seems to be pretty much standard: 2 TB for $10/month. All across Dropbox, Google, Apple, even Microsoft (the individual plan) are in the same ballpark.
- flatiron 5y ago
  Google drive enterprise for $20 a month for unlimited is the best I’ve found. Rclone and encfs to mount and send the content. Almost 0 issues.
  - alternize 5y ago
    sounds intriguing for backup purposes. I was not able to find this pricing online (without contacting sales), would you have a link for this?
- _huayra_ 5y ago
  I've been using pcloud which has a lifetime plan which is a pretty good deal. I recommend waiting until black friday or August 1 (Swiss national day; they're a CH-based company) when they severely drop the price.
- flatiron 5y ago
  I’ve read that it costs them $2 to store a single TB a month. Which makes sense. $4 -> $10 is a reasonable markup. I store 80 TB for $20. They lose money on me.

setBoolean 5y ago

I have a HomeKit power plug that is able to measure the power usage. It sits before most of my living room devices including: 2x OG HomePods (Standby) - 55" Philips OLED (Standby) - Hue Bridge 2. Gen (Running) - ATV 4K 1.Gen (Standby) - Netatmo Weather Station (Running) - Linksys MR8300 OpenWrt 21.02 (Running) - Home Server (i5-6600, 16GB DDR3, 2x 256GB 850 EVO, 1Gb USB3 Ethernet Adapter as second NIC, Running) Reading with all devices combined is 35-40W.

deleted 5y ago

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antonzabirko 5y ago

I mean if it's a problem just solve it. Yes, the folks in texas who have to pay 10x for electricity probably shouldn't get in if thuy can't afford it. Also, get solar/wind if you are concerned aboit the impact.

swiley 5y ago

Many of these things are really competing with a $20/mo VPS so a full PC that's on 24/7 is still cheaper. Yes you could go further: use portable slim apps that fit on ARM SBCs but then you have to re-do your server config and learn a new app. Plus, at least for me, my PC is on 24/7 anyway.

specialist 5y ago

Why not? Every one needs a hobby. Another benefit to Stapelberg's noodling is setting expectations. Imagine you're bootstrapping a municipal ISP or mid-sized org. Dealing with vendors and products for the first time. What's reasonable? Who knows? Having these projects be a reality check is awesome.

zbrozek 5y ago

I have a symmetric 10 gbps connection at home. I have an EPYC machine that plays host to a number of virtual machine guests for various tasks. One of them is running opnsense to be my router. It's not fast enough to route at line speed, but it's close enough that I don't care. A consumer router or a pi or something would be far slower, and I would start to care. Having a tolerably powerful computer doing this means that it's also my web server for several sites, stores local backups and handles offsite backups, acts as my print server, and hosts a Windows virtual machine for using proprietary software (e.g., for my label printers or firmware updates for random widgets like my Lutron light system). Quiescent appears to be something in the neighborhood of 40 watts. It's not nothing, but it's acceptable, especially for the utility. I don't pay for a VPS because I have the bandwidth and the capacity to self-host everything I want. I spend $8/mo in electricity to run that machine, and that will drop to zero when my solar array and battery become functional. If the power consumption were 5x worse I would probably not have gone this route.

hatware 5y ago

I have decade old hardware that is certainly inefficient, but my services hosted have taught me so much it's not even worth the comparison. Yes, electricity is cheap in America but we all choose to spend money on our hobbies as we please. I'll bet there's a few nitpicks with your hobbies where you trade a lot of time/money/something that I don't necessarily understand. And that's okay.

allenrb 5y ago

When I was younger, 100W was a light bulb. We’ve come a long way. :-)

juancb 5y ago

I've used managed power strips for data center applications in the past. The strips have individually addressable power ports and a web interface, telnet, as well as SNMP support. They've been around for decades and are the solution to your problem of needing to remotely manage the power state of power hungry devices. If you set your servers to always power on after power is restored you can control them with that device. There's also Wake On Lan (WoL) support in a lot of systems, where you can use a correctly crafted "magic frame" to wake up any machine that received it.

harikb 5y ago

There is such a thing as wake-on-lan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

AdrianB1 5y ago

My home server using a very similar configuration (same CPU, a lot less potent network) is what enables me to work from home, making a living, so the cost of electricity is compensated by the gas saved on commuting. I am also in process of adding solar to my house, covering a lot more than this server. If people use old servers in the kilowatt range consumption for fooling around having a server in the basement is questionable, building something with low power in mind is nothing to complain about.

cptskippy 5y ago

My home has a 0.5-0.7kWh idle load, with the varying 0.2kWh being from the refrigerators cycling. I tried shutting down my NAS and Home server and it was less than 0.1kWh. I'm at a loss to explain exactly what is drawing 0.4kWh of power but my neighbor has a similar load on his. I'm suspecting all of the fancy and useless motion/astro light switches installed are partially to blame but there's no easy way to verify that.

cortesoft 5y ago

My solar panels on my roof generate about 10KW/h more than I use. I can bank credits with the grid, but can never cash them out, so electricity is basically free for me.

f3d46600-b66e 5y ago

My Netgear access point consumes 7-8watts. My home server, with 2*12TB drives, 2*3TB, and 1nvme, which also acts as NVR (for POE cameras), recording 24x7, and which also acts as owncloud server (and few other things) consumes 40-50watts (and it includes a 10gbps SFP+ fiber). It also includes a wireless card and acts as an access point. It also runs a few VMS, continuous integration server, pihole and other stuff. This is not x100, it's x7 times. And the utility is much much higher. Before, i was using amd Apu, and it consumed 20-30 watts, but did not support AES-NI, which made the disk access limited to 60MB/s :-( It's way cheaper to run everything at home than paying for the cloud, even if u include electricity cost. It's about $50/year for electricity (1 watt 24/7 =~ $1 per year)

Aeolun 5y ago

It costs about the same as a Netflix subscription? The people that do this see it as a hobby, so it’s worth spending some money on.

insulanus 5y ago

A Netgear Nighthawk R7000 idles at 8W, max 34W. That will get you 1 Gigabit. Bleeding edge CPUs from Intel and AMD do guzzle power when run at full load, but they also improve in power per IPS, and have added dynamic underclocking, so they also run Compare the TDP of a Pentium 4 from 2000 to a Ryzen 5 3600 or an i7 7700K (These TDPs are supposedly max power output, but take them with a nugget of salt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_... Gotta update that power intuition!