Comment on Selfhosting Sunday - What's up?
spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks agoIn my experience mini computers don’t handle power failures nearly as well as purpose-built hardware.
After several power failures the SSD on my Raspberry Pi became so corrupted it wouldn’t boot, and I was 250 miles away at the time. Overlay file systems work but are a PITA to maintain. By contrast my routers have never had a problem even with repeated power failures, so instead of relying on the Pi I’ve moved my DNS and Wireguard servers to my router.
Besides adding a UPS, how do you deal with power failures? Are you somewhere where they’re not much of a problem?
randombullet@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
All of my remote routers are running RouterOS without anything on top of it. RouterOS is powerful enough for anything I throw on it. But I am using much beefier routers, I have 2 x 5009 and a HAP AX3 which have plenty of flash and ram ro run the additional packages I need.
As for normal computers, I have it on a UPS and I backup core files to off-site areas. Additionally, I buy SSDs that have a little bit of powerloss protection.
I’ve never had issues with mini PCs but I’ve had issues with PIs. I’ve since switched to high endurance SD cards for my Pis and they’ve been rock solid. One’s actually semi exposed to the elements for about a year now without a hiccup.
With RouterOS you can still use DoH with either a self hosted list or a selected ad list. If you want to selfhost a DNS server I’d just host a Adguard Home instance on a VPS for all of your devices.
I also have 2 VPN system for my remote management on 2 separate systems. I learned that the hard way when one of my clients is 8 timezones away.
spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Power loss protection on SSDs is an interesting addition I hadn’t come across before.
We live in a very windy area and power blinks are common. A high endurance MicroSD was in use the first time the Pi wouldn’t boot, but I was in town and it was just annoying. It was a big issue when the Pi wouldn’t boot from the SSD while I was out of the country.
We don’t have high bandwidth demands so any decent OpenWRT router works fine and supports both Adguard Home and Wireguard. What I really like about putting WG in particular on the router is that if the router is up, WG is working, and the routers come back up without fail after every power outage. A 2nd Wireguard instance still runs on my Pi but since switching to WG on the router a year ago there hasn’t been a reason to even connect to it.
My problems with the Pi had me looking for other solutions and I ended up with a mini Dell laptop running Debian. (Can’t easily run WG on it due to some software conflicts.) It alleviates the need for a UPS and runs for 6+ hours if the power goes out, rather the minutes provided by my small UPS.
One of these days I’ll find a bogus reason to talk myself into upgrading the router with more powerful hardware. Mikrotik looks like a great option and I’ll take a look at RouterOS. Thanks for the info.
randombullet@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
RouterOS has WG built in as well as ZeroTier. RouterOS has become quite powerful lately, but make sure you have at least an ARM/ARM64 CPU for it.