I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.

Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?

  • Encrypt-Keeper
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    75 months ago

    Uh, in your “enterprise” maybe lol.

    • BritishJ
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      -35 months ago

      In pretty much any enterprise using the public cloud. Everything is auto scaling, so shutdowns when not needed. Dev environments shutdown over night… If you’re not shutting down and scaling in the public cloud, you’re doing it wrong.

      • Encrypt-Keeper
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        75 months ago

        Ok scaling is not what we’re talking about here lol.

        • BritishJ
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          5 months ago

          Is it shutting down servers… Yes. it just does it based on parameters and thresholds.

          Then you get things like VDI servers and jump boxes that only need to be on between certain hours, so get shutdown outside them hours.

          • Encrypt-Keeper
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            85 months ago

            No Donny it’s not. You’re out of your element here.

            • FippleStone
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              25 months ago

              They’re fuckin’ nihilists dude, they don’t believe in anything

            • BritishJ
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              -35 months ago

              But it is. They’re stopped and deallocated. They start up when demanded. And shutdown when below a threshold or a certain schedule.

              • Encrypt-Keeper
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                35 months ago

                I’m starting to understand why British admins are paid so much less than their American counterparts.

                • BritishJ
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                  05 months ago

                  You do understand, when you have VM’s set to auto scale, they shutdown when not in use, if you’re using horizontal scaling.

          • @WordBox
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            75 months ago

            Right you don’t shut them down, you scale them down. My server also uses less power off peak demand.

            • BritishJ
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              -45 months ago

              No we shut them down. They get deallocated the same way as shutting down a virtual server does. They’re not containers, the scaling part just turns them on and off based on workload or schedule

      • @BarbecueCowboy
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        65 months ago

        I see where your head is at here, but it sounds like you’re focusing on containerized items. A lot of people are going to look at you real weird if you think of scaling down a container as equivalent to shutting down a server. We can all see where your mind is going and there is logic there, but it’s more akin to closing chrome when you’re not using it than it is to shutting down the computer running chrome.

        • @brygphilomena
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          65 months ago

          Even physical hardware, if your paying power you can have clusters of physical hardware power up and down based on usage. There is no point in having 10 physical hosts running when the workload for n+1 means 3 servers overnight. With bnc, ipmi, ilo, idrac it will power them up as needed.

          • BritishJ
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            -15 months ago

            Finally someone who gets it.

            • @brygphilomena
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              35 months ago

              Yup. I run those kind of clusters. But unless your in home datacenter territory, that sort of config isn’t likely to happen in self hosted.