17 ms·

We are now Solar Powered

160 points by adriangrigore 5y ago

htk 5y ago
What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.
- dvh 5y ago
  Because of dithering, that photo is 50kB, jpeg could easily have the same size and look much better.
  - painchoc 5y ago
    Exactly. Dithering creates a lot of noise and PNG is poor choice to compress that.
    - shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
      it's the opposite way round. png is especially good at compressing dithered images. It's a reduced color palette, (in this case just black and white) so there's lots of repeated sequences. Which works very well with lossless compression.
      - Sophistifunk 5y ago
        And yet, a 50kb JPG would look much better.
- truculent 5y ago
  It reminded me of the images on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com For example https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H91.250-933.png https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H...
  - jhgb 5y ago
    This photo kind of looks like a halftone printing scan to me. In case that it actually isn't, maybe that was just the intention.
    - truculent 5y ago
      The main site (https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ as opposed to https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) has normal images (for example https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e888330282e10a2f88200b-pi https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e888330282e1...), so I assume it's a deliberate choice to go with the low-tech aesthetic (while having practical benefits around bandwidth and so on).
- eldersnake 5y ago
  Dithered images won't be for everyone. I'm sure if I shrunk down a full colour JPEG to a very small size I could have used those rather than my dithered images, but I figure I could have a bit extra size (dimensions) with the dithered images. Also, yeah, I was totally going for the Solar version of Low Tech Magazine's aesthetic too...
diggan 5y ago
This effort seems to be hosted in Australia, there is another similar project (albeit a magazine rather than personal website) that is run from Barcelona: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ It would interesting to see similar efforts but from locations where the sun is less prominent, although I don't know how feasible that would actually be, guess it would depend on the size of the battery installation to avoid the fluctuations. Also projects powered by alternative means (wind and hydro comes to mind) would be awesome to see.
- adriangrigore 5y ago
  He says he was inspired by https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/.
- cfn 5y ago
  I had a similar setup running for two years day and night in the South of Portugal (also very sunny) without any issues. I used two very old 120W solar panels, a Victron charge controller and a 60Ah deep cycle battery running a 4G Modem/Router/Wifi and a security camera. At the house, which was some 300 meters away, I had a Ubiquiti Nano that connected to the modem and my wired network. I suspect a 300Ah battery with 600W solar panels would take you through the Winter in the UK and similar latitudes.
atvatar12 5y ago
A webpage, hosted on a Raspberry Pie, still reachable after mentioned on HN #4. Quite impressive, why do we need CDN again?
- adriangrigore 5y ago
  Also, solar powered, don't forget!
- Aachen 5y ago
  I also had a site running on a server of a few Watts and didn't have trouble with the HN homepage at #1. And it wasn't static files, it needed multiple mysql queries to build each response. And ran apache and php that, yesterday, some people here were surprised is still in use - yup it's fine and plenty fast. Just don't use wordpress or similar without converting it to static pages (e.g. through caching). I should also look into solar panels. I don't live where I host anymore (living in Germany now, good uplinks at home are usually impossible or at minimum expensive) so it's a bit more complicated but posts like these are inspiring.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    I remember a pinephone hosted website working well under the pressure of the first position on HN. It looks like the secret is really no uneeded data and correctly configured server.
- louwrentius 5y ago
  My own blog - running on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi 3b+ was also hugged by HN, but it didn't even sweat. [0] [0]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-power.html https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po...
  - eldersnake 5y ago
    Nice! I'm amazed I haven't seen your blog before, and you've done a much better job than I did overall. (I'm the author of the article btw) I will have to take some notes...
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
From the site: > I'm fairly familiar with CSS3 and all the new whizz bang CSS things that I could very well use to make this fancy looking, but I decided to go the simplest route. [...] Also it's basically mobile responsive out of the box. But then I notice some column layout : https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/#about https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/#about How is that responsive? Well, "inpect" reveals flexbox, which is very much modern css. Still minimalist though.
- eldersnake 5y ago
  You're not wrong, but my intention was not so much about not using _any_ CSS3, but more about keeping a basic design that degrades gracefully. Which it does, if you view it in a terminal browser it works totally fine.
numair 5y ago
> An Optus AC800s 4G/LTE modem (actually a Netgear device, just branded by the carrier), connected to two MiMO Yagi antennas, I have a feeling that the best case / worst case scenario on what powers that remote 4G tower will disappoint a lot of people hoping this is a zero carbon footprint endeavor...
anthk 5y ago
A gopher server would be really good to save power.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  … because no one would use it, so the modem can stay in standby all the time? (The difference in power consumption for HTTP will be utterly negligible, and the addition of TLS very slight, amounting to no more than a couple of percent in the most extreme and pessimistic cases, according to my vague recollection of TLS CPU usage from some years ago.)
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
On measuring power and system load to correlate them (something the article mentions) - I would hook the Pi up to something that can measure outlet power consumption and report via USB, and then feed that back into the Pi’s own USB port. Metrics can then be collected and stored, and easily analyzed with eg. grafana. I have such a setup with an old watts up meter, telegraf collecting raw data off a custom script that talks to the watts up via usb, Prometheus for data storage and grafana for analysis. If telegraf/Prometheus are overkill for the Pi, a cron that gets the power measurement and stores in an SQLite database would do the trick. Or one can go even more classical and use rrdtool to store and plot data, which can then be exposed as static files via the existing nginx setup.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- eldersnake 5y ago
  Thank you for this, that's really handy info!
Jedd 5y ago
> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently consume a fairly consistent 100W, which might kibosh these kinds of cheap and cheerful solar + car battery rigs. Plus I've not seen what Starlink offers in terms of fixed IP, or at least inbound routing. I can confirm that NBN SMP (as above) while relatively cheap for those of us in the middle of nowhere, does suffer from CGNAT, which makes this kind of self-hosted service infeasible.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  Carrier-imposed NAT is a horrible thing, and it isn't clear to me why connections can't be given _at least_ a publicly accessible IPv6 address.
  - Jedd 5y ago
    Can confirm that it's truly horrendous. Since switching to that grade of service I have consistently had captcha challenges every time I go through paypal (despite it saying 'we recognise you on this device...'), my Unifi VPN fails to work, despite following several guides specifically for double NAT (I'll probably end up with wireguard), and most recently my O365 endpoint failed to talk to me, as one of the half-dozen IPv4 addresses they route out of had been marked by Spamhaus.org, which a) is identified a woeful arrangement in itself, and b) took me two days to get rectified by the ISP by switching which address I came out with (a minor change which resulted in a 24 hour total outage). I did ask about IPv6 - but nothing about that experience screamed 'we're ready to move our customers to IPv6', as you could imagine.
  - conradev 5y ago
    T-Mobile switched from CGNAT to 464XLAT and an IPv6-only network something like 7 years ago … but I believe they heavily filter the traffic in said IPv6 network, so that the addresses are not reachable
marcodiego 5y ago
> Indeed, as mentioned earlier, these common internet ports are blocked off at ISP level, so no amount of port forwarding in the router will expose our little web server to the internet. I'd try to work around that limitation using tor: https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html Clients will have to use tor too, but it could be used to complement instead of replacing the current solution.
- aaron_m04 5y ago
  You could do that, but it would add a lot of latency, and I thought that's what the author was trying to avoid.
praveen9920 5y ago
> …bit of reverse proxying with Nginx is needed also… Nginx reverse proxy has capability of caching static assets, does it mean most of the website is actually being served by cloud? So, technically raspberry pie should be consuming power only when cache timesout.
- eldersnake 5y ago
  Article author here, your question is actually a really good one as I'm a bit of an Nginx newb and your comment had me wondering that too. However for the past few hours since this article has been shared the hits have gone quite crazy according to the Raspberry Pis access.log, and the Pagekite.py process is constantly around 30-70% CPU usage, implying a heavy load as normally it uses nearly nothing. Does Nginx reverse proxy cache by default? I'm assuming not given my current results.
  - mercora 5y ago
    no it wont do that by default, there would be quite some wild assumptions to be made to make it a default for everything. even if cache behavior would be signaled from upstream servers properly.
  - praveen9920 5y ago
    Not by default.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor. The refridgerator literally has directly observable physical effects on the world - chilled wine! - and yet it uses less power than a device doing symbolic operations all day.
- forty 5y ago
  Your computer heats air, which is a observable physical effect, though an unintended one ;)
  - jhgb 5y ago
    In winter it could be an intended effect.
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      Quite a few buildings are heated with datacenter waste heat.
- mackmgg 5y ago
  If you don't need all of the speed, I'd recommend disabling power boost. My i9 laptop averages ~10-15W with it disabled, compared to the ~20W my fridge uses. Even when maxed out CPU it's only ~40W, compared to ~100W with power boost enabled. That's more than double the power despite only being a modest speed increase!
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Given that I spend the day compiling C++ for a project that takes 11 mins to build from scratch, disabling power boost isn't really viable for me.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xupybd 5y ago
It's really crappy that US ISPs block ports. I'm in little New Zealand and have a static IP that allows me to host anything I want.
- halfdan 5y ago
  Author is in rural Australia, but your point is still valid.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    My bad. I tend to assume most of what I read here is from the US.
- amanzi 5y ago
  The "port blocking" may just be a symptom of how the modem connects to the internet, rather than being a malicious act by the ISP. CGNAT is becoming a common way for ISPs to connect consumers to the internet, even here in NZ many ISPs use this. It basically puts a bunch of consumers behind the same NAT interface meaning that port-forwarding no longer works.
  - deathanatos 5y ago
    Even with normal NAT, you have to set up the port-forwarding, and you have to know how to do that. Also, some routers have a bug¹ whereby even a properly port-forwarded service won't be accessible from within the network. E.g., the port-forwarded service "works", except for you, on your own network. Really frustrating since it means how you connect depends on where you are, and it's a lot of special crap needed to determine "oh, okay, I'm on the home network so use the internal IP"; almost ended up setting up a split-horizon DNS to deal with it². ¹ISPs will tell you that they "lack a feature". Yeah, okay. ²but then we moved and now we have a different monopoly for an ISP.
    - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
      1) isn't a bug, it is a lack of a feature. In order to accomplish that you need to double-NAT things because otherwise the internal service will send the reply directly to your computer instead of sending it back to the NAT gateway to reverse the NAT. The router needs to NAT the destination IP for the client and NAT the source IP for the server. The thing is, 99.9999% of these devices never even have the port forwarding feature touched and an even smaller % of the devices where people enable port forwarding care about this.
jconnop 5y ago
Very cool, though I'd imagine you'd have a pretty good chance of success at just sending the power over that 110m ethernet span.
- eldersnake 5y ago
  Could, but it should be mentioned that power outages can and do happen where I am, so on a few occasions having this solar setup actually meant even when my house had absolutely no power (and there's no phone signal at the house), we could still have internet connectivity.
entaloneralie 5y ago
Second blog post is about how great Gab is? yikes.
- eldersnake 5y ago
  To be fair, after a bit more time on there my opinion on Gab changed a fair bit (not in a good way). And my encouraging people on there was precisely to try prevent it being a massive echo chamber, and I did admire the fact they have withstood pressure by Big Tech and kept their servers alive. Nowadays though I generally am all for self-hosting as much as possible and staying away from these silos.
pabs3 5y ago
I wonder if the modem also runs Linux, then you could drop the router and RPi and save a bit more power.

160 points by adriangrigore 5y ago

htk 5y ago

What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.

dvh 5y ago
Because of dithering, that photo is 50kB, jpeg could easily have the same size and look much better.
- painchoc 5y ago
  Exactly. Dithering creates a lot of noise and PNG is poor choice to compress that.
  - shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
    it's the opposite way round. png is especially good at compressing dithered images. It's a reduced color palette, (in this case just black and white) so there's lots of repeated sequences. Which works very well with lossless compression.
    - Sophistifunk 5y ago
      And yet, a 50kb JPG would look much better.
truculent 5y ago
It reminded me of the images on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com For example https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H91.250-933.png https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H...
- jhgb 5y ago
  This photo kind of looks like a halftone printing scan to me. In case that it actually isn't, maybe that was just the intention.
  - truculent 5y ago
    The main site (https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ as opposed to https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) has normal images (for example https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e888330282e10a2f88200b-pi https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e888330282e1...), so I assume it's a deliberate choice to go with the low-tech aesthetic (while having practical benefits around bandwidth and so on).
eldersnake 5y ago
Dithered images won't be for everyone. I'm sure if I shrunk down a full colour JPEG to a very small size I could have used those rather than my dithered images, but I figure I could have a bit extra size (dimensions) with the dithered images. Also, yeah, I was totally going for the Solar version of Low Tech Magazine's aesthetic too...

diggan 5y ago

This effort seems to be hosted in Australia, there is another similar project (albeit a magazine rather than personal website) that is run from Barcelona: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ It would interesting to see similar efforts but from locations where the sun is less prominent, although I don't know how feasible that would actually be, guess it would depend on the size of the battery installation to avoid the fluctuations. Also projects powered by alternative means (wind and hydro comes to mind) would be awesome to see.

adriangrigore 5y ago
He says he was inspired by https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/.
cfn 5y ago
I had a similar setup running for two years day and night in the South of Portugal (also very sunny) without any issues. I used two very old 120W solar panels, a Victron charge controller and a 60Ah deep cycle battery running a 4G Modem/Router/Wifi and a security camera. At the house, which was some 300 meters away, I had a Ubiquiti Nano that connected to the modem and my wired network. I suspect a 300Ah battery with 600W solar panels would take you through the Winter in the UK and similar latitudes.

atvatar12 5y ago

A webpage, hosted on a Raspberry Pie, still reachable after mentioned on HN #4. Quite impressive, why do we need CDN again?

adriangrigore 5y ago
Also, solar powered, don't forget!
Aachen 5y ago
I also had a site running on a server of a few Watts and didn't have trouble with the HN homepage at #1. And it wasn't static files, it needed multiple mysql queries to build each response. And ran apache and php that, yesterday, some people here were surprised is still in use - yup it's fine and plenty fast. Just don't use wordpress or similar without converting it to static pages (e.g. through caching). I should also look into solar panels. I don't live where I host anymore (living in Germany now, good uplinks at home are usually impossible or at minimum expensive) so it's a bit more complicated but posts like these are inspiring.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I remember a pinephone hosted website working well under the pressure of the first position on HN. It looks like the secret is really no uneeded data and correctly configured server.
louwrentius 5y ago
My own blog - running on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi 3b+ was also hugged by HN, but it didn't even sweat. [0] [0]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-power.html https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po...
- eldersnake 5y ago
  Nice! I'm amazed I haven't seen your blog before, and you've done a much better job than I did overall. (I'm the author of the article btw) I will have to take some notes...

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

From the site: > I'm fairly familiar with CSS3 and all the new whizz bang CSS things that I could very well use to make this fancy looking, but I decided to go the simplest route. [...] Also it's basically mobile responsive out of the box. But then I notice some column layout : https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/#about https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/#about How is that responsive? Well, "inpect" reveals flexbox, which is very much modern css. Still minimalist though.

eldersnake 5y ago
You're not wrong, but my intention was not so much about not using _any_ CSS3, but more about keeping a basic design that degrades gracefully. Which it does, if you view it in a terminal browser it works totally fine.

numair 5y ago

> An Optus AC800s 4G/LTE modem (actually a Netgear device, just branded by the carrier), connected to two MiMO Yagi antennas, I have a feeling that the best case / worst case scenario on what powers that remote 4G tower will disappoint a lot of people hoping this is a zero carbon footprint endeavor...

anthk 5y ago

A gopher server would be really good to save power.

chrismorgan 5y ago
… because no one would use it, so the modem can stay in standby all the time? (The difference in power consumption for HTTP will be utterly negligible, and the addition of TLS very slight, amounting to no more than a couple of percent in the most extreme and pessimistic cases, according to my vague recollection of TLS CPU usage from some years ago.)

loloquwowndueo 5y ago

On measuring power and system load to correlate them (something the article mentions) - I would hook the Pi up to something that can measure outlet power consumption and report via USB, and then feed that back into the Pi’s own USB port. Metrics can then be collected and stored, and easily analyzed with eg. grafana. I have such a setup with an old watts up meter, telegraf collecting raw data off a custom script that talks to the watts up via usb, Prometheus for data storage and grafana for analysis. If telegraf/Prometheus are overkill for the Pi, a cron that gets the power measurement and stores in an SQLite database would do the trick. Or one can go even more classical and use rrdtool to store and plot data, which can then be exposed as static files via the existing nginx setup.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eldersnake 5y ago
Thank you for this, that's really handy info!

Jedd 5y ago

> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently consume a fairly consistent 100W, which might kibosh these kinds of cheap and cheerful solar + car battery rigs. Plus I've not seen what Starlink offers in terms of fixed IP, or at least inbound routing. I can confirm that NBN SMP (as above) while relatively cheap for those of us in the middle of nowhere, does suffer from CGNAT, which makes this kind of self-hosted service infeasible.

zbrozek 5y ago
Carrier-imposed NAT is a horrible thing, and it isn't clear to me why connections can't be given _at least_ a publicly accessible IPv6 address.
- Jedd 5y ago
  Can confirm that it's truly horrendous. Since switching to that grade of service I have consistently had captcha challenges every time I go through paypal (despite it saying 'we recognise you on this device...'), my Unifi VPN fails to work, despite following several guides specifically for double NAT (I'll probably end up with wireguard), and most recently my O365 endpoint failed to talk to me, as one of the half-dozen IPv4 addresses they route out of had been marked by Spamhaus.org, which a) is identified a woeful arrangement in itself, and b) took me two days to get rectified by the ISP by switching which address I came out with (a minor change which resulted in a 24 hour total outage). I did ask about IPv6 - but nothing about that experience screamed 'we're ready to move our customers to IPv6', as you could imagine.
- conradev 5y ago
  T-Mobile switched from CGNAT to 464XLAT and an IPv6-only network something like 7 years ago … but I believe they heavily filter the traffic in said IPv6 network, so that the addresses are not reachable

marcodiego 5y ago

> Indeed, as mentioned earlier, these common internet ports are blocked off at ISP level, so no amount of port forwarding in the router will expose our little web server to the internet. I'd try to work around that limitation using tor: https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html Clients will have to use tor too, but it could be used to complement instead of replacing the current solution.

aaron_m04 5y ago
You could do that, but it would add a lot of latency, and I thought that's what the author was trying to avoid.

praveen9920 5y ago

> …bit of reverse proxying with Nginx is needed also… Nginx reverse proxy has capability of caching static assets, does it mean most of the website is actually being served by cloud? So, technically raspberry pie should be consuming power only when cache timesout.

eldersnake 5y ago
Article author here, your question is actually a really good one as I'm a bit of an Nginx newb and your comment had me wondering that too. However for the past few hours since this article has been shared the hits have gone quite crazy according to the Raspberry Pis access.log, and the Pagekite.py process is constantly around 30-70% CPU usage, implying a heavy load as normally it uses nearly nothing. Does Nginx reverse proxy cache by default? I'm assuming not given my current results.
- mercora 5y ago
  no it wont do that by default, there would be quite some wild assumptions to be made to make it a default for everything. even if cache behavior would be signaled from upstream servers properly.
- praveen9920 5y ago
  Not by default.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor. The refridgerator literally has directly observable physical effects on the world - chilled wine! - and yet it uses less power than a device doing symbolic operations all day.

forty 5y ago
Your computer heats air, which is a observable physical effect, though an unintended one ;)
- jhgb 5y ago
  In winter it could be an intended effect.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    Quite a few buildings are heated with datacenter waste heat.
mackmgg 5y ago
If you don't need all of the speed, I'd recommend disabling power boost. My i9 laptop averages ~10-15W with it disabled, compared to the ~20W my fridge uses. Even when maxed out CPU it's only ~40W, compared to ~100W with power boost enabled. That's more than double the power despite only being a modest speed increase!
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Given that I spend the day compiling C++ for a project that takes 11 mins to build from scratch, disabling power boost isn't really viable for me.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xupybd 5y ago

It's really crappy that US ISPs block ports. I'm in little New Zealand and have a static IP that allows me to host anything I want.

halfdan 5y ago
Author is in rural Australia, but your point is still valid.
- xupybd 5y ago
  My bad. I tend to assume most of what I read here is from the US.
amanzi 5y ago
The "port blocking" may just be a symptom of how the modem connects to the internet, rather than being a malicious act by the ISP. CGNAT is becoming a common way for ISPs to connect consumers to the internet, even here in NZ many ISPs use this. It basically puts a bunch of consumers behind the same NAT interface meaning that port-forwarding no longer works.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  Even with normal NAT, you have to set up the port-forwarding, and you have to know how to do that. Also, some routers have a bug¹ whereby even a properly port-forwarded service won't be accessible from within the network. E.g., the port-forwarded service "works", except for you, on your own network. Really frustrating since it means how you connect depends on where you are, and it's a lot of special crap needed to determine "oh, okay, I'm on the home network so use the internal IP"; almost ended up setting up a split-horizon DNS to deal with it². ¹ISPs will tell you that they "lack a feature". Yeah, okay. ²but then we moved and now we have a different monopoly for an ISP.
  - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
    1) isn't a bug, it is a lack of a feature. In order to accomplish that you need to double-NAT things because otherwise the internal service will send the reply directly to your computer instead of sending it back to the NAT gateway to reverse the NAT. The router needs to NAT the destination IP for the client and NAT the source IP for the server. The thing is, 99.9999% of these devices never even have the port forwarding feature touched and an even smaller % of the devices where people enable port forwarding care about this.

jconnop 5y ago

Very cool, though I'd imagine you'd have a pretty good chance of success at just sending the power over that 110m ethernet span.

eldersnake 5y ago
Could, but it should be mentioned that power outages can and do happen where I am, so on a few occasions having this solar setup actually meant even when my house had absolutely no power (and there's no phone signal at the house), we could still have internet connectivity.

entaloneralie 5y ago

Second blog post is about how great Gab is? yikes.

eldersnake 5y ago
To be fair, after a bit more time on there my opinion on Gab changed a fair bit (not in a good way). And my encouraging people on there was precisely to try prevent it being a massive echo chamber, and I did admire the fact they have withstood pressure by Big Tech and kept their servers alive. Nowadays though I generally am all for self-hosting as much as possible and staying away from these silos.

pabs3 5y ago

I wonder if the modem also runs Linux, then you could drop the router and RPi and save a bit more power.