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Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Tus monitores no hacen esto.

Odio que cuan­do mue­vo una ven­tana con tex­to per­fec­ta­mente leg­i­ble al otro mon­i­tor de golpe es muy grande o muy chico. Hay solu­ción para es­to? Sí, pero ...

How much energy does my office server use?

Just ran in­to this video where the host ex­plains how he's us­ing a home serv­er and how he made it use un­der 23W, and the steps he took to make it qui­et and ef­fi­cien­t.

So, know­ing that our servers are not com­pa­ra­ble I want­ed to check how much pow­er my serv­er used.

Yes, my serv­er is pret­ty un­usu­al, you can read about it here: 1 2 3 4 5

First let's look at MAX­I­MUM pow­er draw for all com­po­nents.

  • Com­put­er (Radxa Ze­ro): 900 mA at 5V
  • HD­D: 500 mA at 5V (x2)
  • Net­work USB adapter: 500 mA at 5V

There is al­so a USB 3.0 hub there but the pow­er us­age is neg­li­gi­ble, prob­a­bly be­low 100 mA at 5V.

So, the max­i­mum pow­er us­age is ~2400 mA at 5V, which is about 12 watts.

When more or less idle, mea­sured with a USB thingie, the Radxa Ze­ro us­es ~200 mA and the Net­work adapter nev­er seems to go above 150 mA, so a low­er bound is maybe about ~1300 mA, or about 6 watts.

And then there's cost. My whole sys­tem (which does ev­ery­thing I want nice­ly AFAIC­S) costs un­der 100 dol­lars. And my pow­er bill from it is, if it runs full throt­tle ALL THE TIME (it does­n't) ... $87

Mind you, that's 87 ar­gen­tini­an pe­sos, or be­tween 50 and 25 USD cents, de­pend­ing on your ex­change rate.

I think I'll man­age.

Tu escritorio no hace esto (3)

Acabo de ver un video de un youtu­ber "de tec­nología" que con­tro­la la luz de su es­crito­rio con la app del celu­lar ... WAT? PORQUÉ? Es más fá­cil con­tro­lar­la co­mo to­do lo demás, des­de tu teclado!

Pet Server (September 2022 update)

This is a longer-term up­date on the state of my home serv­er. You can read more about it in these 1 2 3 4 post­s.

What's the hardware nowadays?

  • Radxa Ze­ro: 4-­core 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC
  • 2 1TB HDD over USB
  • 100Mbps eth­er­net wired con­nec­tion to the router

And ... so far, it's more than enough. No strain :-)

What is it running?

Al­so back­ups via restic and oth­er ran­dom things. I have a sep­a­rate oc­to­print serv­er but I may move it here.

Really, it runs all that?

Yeah, and it works just fine. Of course this is most­ly be­cause I am the on­ly re­al user, but hey, it work­s.

Anything else you would want to run?

  • Maybe some sort of push no­ti­fi­ca­tion thingie so I can no­ti­fy my phone if there's a prob­lem
  • Maybe grafana? But don't care enough yet.

Was it worth it?

I could run all this on cloud­s, but the hard­ware I am us­ing would cost maybe 100 dol­lars, and month­ly fees for ser­vices will quick­ly reach that amount and sur­pass it. I am al­ready pay­ing for the band­width any­way.

OTOH I have spent maybe 50 or 60 hours set­ting this up and if I look at my hourly rates ... ick.

Anything weird?

I re­al­ly don't un­der­stand oth­er peo­ple's home­lab­s, they seem wild­ly over­pow­ered.


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