4mo ago

Do you poweroff your server during night / unused times?

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?

102 comments

I leave my servers running 24/7, thats the point of a server. Also my home automation would be a little pointless if its off.
I did have a UPS, but it died and I have got round to replacing it.
Its all horses for courses, if your homelab is a playground to test things out then turning it off when not is use is fine. But some have live services that you may want at a moments notice and there for having it up all the time is better.
- I'm in the same boat as you. My server runs 24/7, because I have some services that require close to 100% uptime to function correctly.
  My UPS works fine though, and I wouldn't go without it these days. Just because the damage an improper shutdown can cause on data.

There's a poweroff?!
- Im pretty sure OP is just yanking our chain.

And ruin my uptime stats? Are you mad?!?!
Among the many things I run are my own email servers so, yeah gotta be up all the time. And yes I have a UPS behind every electronic device in my house except the TV because if that dies I get to buy a new one.
I've probably spent upwards of $2000 on UPSes and replacement batteries over the last 20 years, but if it saved even one of my servers from taking a hit it was worth it. Servers are expensive and my time is valuable to me.
- Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/705/

My home server does all my network related stuff (including DNS and DHCP) turning it off would be a very bad idea due to this.
I don't have a UPS, but it is relatively high on my list.
- It all depends if you actually nerd those services 24/7
  I dont need DHCP or DNS from 1am to 6am for example
  
  "Do I need them? No, but I nerd them, so they stay up!"
  A most relevant typo 👍
  
  You may not but your phone will fail over to data if it loses its lease and stuff like background update tasks will cease to function (like Windows Update or dnf cron)
- I moved my DNS to a pair of raspberry Pi 3's running bind, with a DNS stub zone for my homelab domain that points to my homelab DNS servers.
  That way the internet keeps working whether my homelab works or not. Keeps the wife aggro down.

You can do whatever you want. Don't let anyone tell you it's "wrong". A big part of homelabbing is to try stuff. If it doesn't work, that's fine, you learned something, and that was the point.
For me, I don't see a UPS as essential. It's generally a good idea, but not strictly essential. My servers are on 24/7, because I have services that do things overnight for me. I also know that some people access my lab when I'm not awake, so I just leave it on so it can be ready for anything at any time. It poses some unique challenges sometimes when running stuff that's basically 24/7/365.
Be safe, have fun, learn stuff.
- I have a 'dumb' UPS for my synology NAS to protect against short power outages - it's done after a minute or 10 though so if I'm not at home it'll crash anyway. In Retrospect I should've gone for a smart one that will shutdown the NAS.

24/7 of course, that's the point of it. But I have solar, so I don't mind consuming power, and its not thatuxh a yway, so, anyway...
What's the point in turning it off at all???
- Could be that it is hosting services that are only actively used instead of passively doing stuff, so no real need to have the server on when you're sleeping. For me turning it off and on again would be more of a hassle than it's worth it.
  
  Agreed. First of all that would make running backups more complex, and would require either manual interaction, or very careful automation of some kind.
  And any public facing service (like blog and some stuff) would still need to be accessible somehow, so...
- Saving power of course.
  Reducing noise and temps is another.
  
  I have solar, so the power consumption is negligible, I am already mostly selling yo the network and not "consuming" most of the days. Also, the server stuff sits in a sound proofed and ventilated compartment in the most remote area of the house.
  20 years of planning ahahahahah
  Past the times when it was sitting in my bedroom.

An UPS is a must for any computer, even if all it's doing is absorbing the shock of a brownout and triggering a graceful shutdown.
I run persistent services that require 24/7 uptime.
- Meh. I lose power every 3 or 4 years on average. A UPS just doesn't make sense for me. (When I lived in Virginia it was once a month on average, so for sure it made sense....)
  
  Like he was saying, it's more than just power loss. It's a way of "sanitizing" the power as it comes in. This is "usually" not a problem. But dirty power is arguably worse than power outages. If the voltages fluctuate or get low for whatever reason that puts a big strain on your power supplies.
  This could happen because you run a vacuum on the same circuit and your house is old, guy down the street electrocutes himself or the power coming in from the electric company is 'dirty' because they have an issue with transformers or up stream somewhere. It can be imperceptible to you, but your tech notices.
  
  Same here. I would say total power outages are a bit more rare than every three years. But we had some failure last year and two years before that a neighbor dug through some cables and most of the street went dark. Sometimes I contribute and plug in some (old) electrical device that isn't okay anymore. This year I got some water into the extension cord while cleaning outside... And since we have ground fault protection for the house, I had to reboot everything. The server and the 4 harddisks in it are perfectly fine. And have been for like a decade. I don't think I need to pay for an UPS and the additional power it needs.

My servers are on 24/7, currently they use about 100watts each (I have 2 running), which adds maybe $20 to my electric bill. I also have stuff such as mailcow, nextcloud, and mattermost running, turning off every night would make those applications useless.
I have a shit APC desktop UPS. It keeps them on for 10-15 minutes at best.
- Imo you probably save more money keeping the server up 24/7 than constantly shutting it down and starting it up again. Especially once you get a good list of services going.

Absolutely not. Ever. It does a parity check monthly and then reboots, that's that.
- Sounds familiar. Unraid? 🤠
  
  Yup. Been very happy with it for almost 5 years. 🤓
  When my wife sees all my interactions in Lemmy, she says that we're just a bunch of nerds. Of course we are 🤣😂. That's the beauty of this.

No one should be powering off their servers. Thats really not the way to go about anything. Now there’s nothing stopping you from doing that either if you want to and it makes you happy or your life easier.
But if you want a simple answer to a simple question, no, nobody sane is doing that lol
- We power off servers in the enterprise all the time and on schedules 😂. Its called saving money.
  
  Uh, in your “enterprise” maybe lol.

Nope always on. Also runs homeaasiatant so if it was off I would lose the schedule use for lights, or phone connection for on/off etc. But yes, get a UPS, even ifvyou haven't had a power faikure a good UPS will monitor and correct voltage amd dirty power. It has saved me a couple of times.

24/7 I have home assistant and other things that depend on it being up. It's not a beast but it definitely uses less than my oven. My electric use is big already from my electric car so the small savings wouldn't be noticeable alongside my solar panels.

No. Yes. Kind of.
My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it's jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.

Server is on 24/7 and it has a UPS for the momentary brown outs I have during heavy winds. It would be silly if it's off for any reason besides maintenance, even more so since it holds multiple game worlds in addition to some web and chat stuff.

I have low power usage stuff so I just leave it on.

My NAS and production server run 24/7, I've got a dev server that I turn off if I'm not expecting to use it for a week or so. Usually when I do that, I immediately need it for something and I'm away from home. I have chosen equipment to try and minimize energy use to allow for constant running.
My view on UPS is it's a crucial part of getting your availability percentage up. As my home lab turned into crucial services I used to replace commercial cloud options, that became more important to me. Whether it is to you will depend on what you're running and why.
I've heard that one of the most likely times for hard drives to fail is on power up, and it also makes sense to me that the heating/cooling cycles would be bad for the magnetic coating, so my NAS is configured to keep them spinning, and it hasn't been turned off since I last did a drive change.

Is it controversial because of the fact that "power off" is two words?
- Yes, because the CLI command is poweroff, so I do agree with you 🙂
  (Please Wait... comments about alternative CLI commands will arrive soon...)
  
  It is "systemctl poweroff" nowadays you fool 😜
  
  That's an odd way of pronouncing sudo telinit 0

I keep mine on 24/7, except I have a cronjob that runs in the early AM to check if it needs a reboot from unattended updates and reboots if needed.

Mine stays on 24/7/365 unless I am going to be out of town.

when i had only the file server, i turned on via WOL each time i actually needed it and a script shut it down if there was no activity after 11pm
now i host so much stuff and i'm so dependant on it that it requires redundant power and failover WAN via 5g...
- Are you tunneling for just the 5g connection to expose your services or just tunneling everything?
  
  Tunnel everything

My server has 5 harddisks (real spinning ones), and everybody says they live longer when running 24/7, so that's what I do. They are 6 or 7 years old now. S.M.A.R.T says they are clean.
Power outages occur sometimes. Once I had a problem with a file system afterwards. Later I got a small ups (for just 10 or 20min) and no trouble anymore.

Entirely depends on the usecase. If it's a NAS and you only watch a few movies in the evening: Turn it off.
I bult a fairly power-efficient server. Consumes less than 20W and spins down the harddisks if not in use.
I can't turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore, my website would go down, my Fediverse instance wouldn't pull any posts from American people who are awake during parts of the night. My emails and chat messages wouldn't get delivered.
I don't have a UPS. Also depends on the circumstances. I use ext4 as a filesystem which is kind of robust enough to handle power outages. And they're rare where I live. A UPS would draw additional power and cost money. It's not worth it for me at home.
- I can't turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore
  Personally I try to avoid making anything in my home actually dependant on my server. I have a single lamp that can only be controlled from my phone and that's only because it's so rarely used that I didn't want to put in the effort. Everything else is local first and only gets extended functionality from my server running.
  I've had a couple issues with my zigbee stuff over the years on the server side and I would be really pissed if I wouldn't be able to turn my lights on because I haven't gotten around to fixing my server yet.
  
  Sure. All that stuff has consequences. I also used to run a DNS Adblocker on that machine. So after a power outage, all the lights in the kitchen and livingroom (those are the smart ones) would turn on at full brighness (their default state). The internet wouldn't ever come back since it's missing its DNS server. Obviously I can't get any notification of the incident, since my server is down... And I fall back to being reachable via phone or SMS. If my wife tells me via chat or email... That's down, too.
  I'm still working on a better solution. It ain't easy, though. It's certainly easier to use some cloud services and have other people keep the infrastructure running in some datacenters which have more redundancy... We have light switches, though. All my smart home stuff is just retrofitted. So we can still turn it off or on with the wall switches. I won't change that until I come up with a solution to this problem. Until then, I've dialed things a bit back and I refrain from making everything "smart" when I can't do it 100% reliably.
  And it's just some lights and the washing machine. While I am a nerd and tinkerer, I don't see any good reason to own a smart toaster, fridge or Alexa. YMMV, of course.
- I can't turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore
  If you have Hue bulbs, you can buy little radios that attach to your light switch (or replacement light switches) that will still operate your lights when the server is down or the network is unavailable. It’s a worthwhile upgrade.

Modular solution. Big NAS for backup and file and media serving shuts down when I go to bed automatically or nobody is home. Boots via WOL when needed.
Always on services on a central pi for home automation, phone and internet services, etc.

It runs 24/7. My Lemmy instance among other things, is running on the server.
I use a Power Station from Allpower with UPS capabilities.

24/7 here with a NUC 8i5 in a fanless case; all SSD. I use a simple UPS (APC 600VA) to protect the server, modem, router, and main network switch, and it survives outages up to about 30 mins.

24/7, no UPS since I am cheap and lazy.
My media center PC has a sleep schedule, though, and goes into suspend in early morning hours. I am sute the power it saves is next to nothing.
I used to do this with my server, too, but scrapped that once I started needing it on randomly at night.

On/off:
I have 5 main chassis excluding desktops. Prod cluster is all flash, standalone host has one flash array, one spinning rust array, NAS is all spinning rust. I have a big enough server disk array that spinning it up is actually a power sink and the Dell firmware takes a looong time to get all the drives up on reboot.
TLDR: Not off as a matter of day/night, off as a matter of summer/winter for heat.
Winter: all on
Summer:
prod cluster on (3x vSAN - it gets really angry if it doesn't have cluster consistency)
NAS on
standalone server off, except to test ESXi patches and when vCenter reboots cause it to be WoL'd (vpxd sends a wake to all stand by hosts on program init)
main desktop on
alt desktops off
VMs are a different story. Normally I just turn them on and off as needed regardless of season, though I will typically turn off more of my "optional" VMs to reduce summer workload in addition to powering off the one server. Rough goal is to reduce thermal load as to not kill my AC as quickly which is probably running above its duty cycle to keep up. Physical wise, these servers are virtualized so this on/off load doesn't cycle the array.
Because all four of my main servers are the same hypervisor (for now, VMware ESXi), VMs can move among the prod cluster to balance load autonomously, and I can move VMs on or off the standalone host by drag-and-drop. When the standalone host is off, I usually move turn it's VMs off and move them onto the prod cluster so I don't get daily "backup failure" emails from the NAS.
UPS: Power in my area is pretty stable, but has a few phase hiccups in the summer. (I know it's a phase hiccup because I mapped out which wall plus are on which phase, confirmed with a multimeter than I'm on two legs of a 3-phase grid hand-off, and watched which devices blip off during an event) For something like a light that will just flicker or a laptop/phone charger that has a high capacitance, such blips are a non issue. Smaller ones can even be eaten by the massive power supplies my Dell servers have. But, my Cisco switches are a bit sensitive to it and tend to sing me the song of their people when the power flickers - aka fan speed 100% boot up whining. Larger blips will also boop the Dell servers, but I don't usually see breaks more than 3-5m.
Current UPS setup is:
rack split into A/B power feeds, with servers plugged into both and every other one flipped A or B as it's primary
single plug devices (like NAS) plugged into just one
"common purpose" devices on the same power feed (ex: my primary firewall, primary switches, and my NAS for backups are on feed A, but my backup disks and my secondary switches are on feed B)
one 1500VA UPS per feed (two total) - aggregate usage is 600-800w
one 1500VA desktop UPS handling my main tower, one monitor, and my PS5 (which gets unreasonably upset about losing power, so it gets the battery backup)
With all that setup, the gauges in the front of the 3 UPSes all show roughly 15-20m run time in summer, and 20-25m in winter. I know one may be lower than displayed because it's battery is older, but even if it fails and dumps it's redundant load onto the main newer UPS I'll still have 7-10m of battery at worst case and that's all I really need to weather most power related issues at my location.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DHCP	Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
ESXi	VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
PiHole	Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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I don't have any job that needs to run 24/7, so I poweroff my server at night (12 am) and start it in the morning using WOL.

Additionally, night time is the time of creating backups. A second server pushes its backup also at night too. Potentially long running tasks like database migration I do at night. Lastly, when my server starts up it needs almost an hour until it truly reaches idle (potentially because it has to keep millions of files in sync with syncthing, I have to investigate). So my servers are more busy at night than at day

When my server was a laptop it was on 24/7. When my server was a desktop I had a cron job to turn it off at 2AM. Now that it's a specialized hardware it's on 24/7.
Being constantly on is very convenient, but if your services start quickly it's not the end of the world to have to turn the machine on for them.

Ignore the URL; I wasn't allowed to post without a link?? kept getting invalid URL, without anything in the field. Not sure why..?
- I’m guessing it’s because you’d selected Link as the post type instead of Text.
  
  Posted using Photon frontend. Doesn't give that choice, you just include what you want in the post normally..
- Hey, I'm the dev. I fixed this recently
  
  Thank you 🙌

I power off my main server during the night cuz it's too loud, but I have a secondary one (an old mini-pc) to handle sh!t like wireguard, PiHole and DNS

Mine turns off at 2 or if noone has been watching for 10 minutes after 2am and turns on at 5:45. Nobody ever uses it during that time. It's pointless to keep it running. Additional bonus is that it auto updates all containers each morning. Yes, I sometimes wake up at 4 or 5 and it would be cool if it were running but it shows that you do not NEED it.

Everything runs 24/7, but now I am thinking about theoretical power saving modes. Besides any built in power saving whatever (a little clueless), you could always throttle the CPU more. Not sure if it would be worth it without testing with a power meter.

UPS depends on usecase and on the stability of your electrical supply (which varies greatly from place to place). I just leave everything running and have it configured to restart automatically on power restore (if it fails, which it rarely does).

24/7 and no UPS. Drains 33W on idle which I found good enough for me

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/705/
- Just watched diehard for the first time with my mother, going to send her this lmao.

I have a small 6U rack in my hallway which is where all the server stuff sits. There are 1U UPS units, but I haven't had the need for it yet. However after replacing motherboard on this current machine I forgot to turn on option for auto start after power failure. My servers are mostly for collecting data regarding temperature, humidity and other metrics around the house, glass house and other parts. Same machine also collects surveillance data from cameras around the property which detect human and animal shapes.
So since machine rarely does long term calculations or data processing it's okay that it doesn't have UPS, since no data would be coming anyway without power.

I personally only turn it off when someone's visiting over night and the noise disturbs them, otherwise I just leave it on nonstop. Mainly because it would annoy me to try to open whatever and find out I have to turn on the server first. I don't have a UPS and never even thought about getting one (for the server, I'm thinking of getting one for my 3D printer).

For a while I had a low-power server for my personal things that stayed on all the time, and a more powerful computer that hosted a minecraft server. As the player count dwindled, I decided to make the minecraft server automatically shut down at midnight, and wake up at 8 in the morning using rtcwake. And eventually I disabled the rtcwake thing entirely, and made the smaller server run a webui that could wake up the minecraft server using wake-on-lan. So if anyone wanted to play, they would first have to remotely turn on the server through a web page. This was all password-protected ofcourse.
Also, no, I don't use a UPS. I've never seen anyone use a UPS in the country where I live, and I don't think I've experienced a power outtage in like 4 years. Whether or not you need a UPS seems to be largely dependent on where you live.

I let my production systems (1x NAS/1x Proxmox Host) on 24/7 and shut down test systems or my onside backup. I do it mainly to save some power and also noise, because all servers are in my office room. I would prefere some low power/noise machines that can keep running 24/7 and if you really need some horse power because you would want to test something or play around, you can power it on and shut down whenever you want.
But I dont use any UPS, because the power grid is very stable where I live but I have snapshots every hour or so. I can live with an hour of data loss if shit hits the fan.

As someone who enjoys pluging USB drives on unnatended computers, I love people that never restart their machines.
Thanks guys, you are the best! Enjoy your uptimes (ง ื▿ ื)ว
- If you're plugging a USB drive into my home server, then I have bigger problems than malware.
- A well managed server won't init an arbitrary drive and has a lock screen with a password so that the most a rubber ducky would be able to do is reboot it. Which is something you'd already be able to do if you had access to the front panel with the power button.

Nope

102 comments