If like me, you’re in the UK! You best grab a good Backup Battery or test your current one soon for your home node server.
The National Grid is warning if things get worse and UK can’t import enough Gas their might have to be power cuts. Hopefully they won’t happen but it’s a good reminder to do some preventative maintenance and checks on your server to keep your node’s uptime and audits as optimal as possible without data loss/corruption due to power cuts!
BBC news :
Customers would be warned in advance about the power cuts, which would occur at peak times, possibly in the morning, or more likely between 4pm and 7pm.
The cuts would be rotated so not all areas of the country were affected at the same time.
However, it said it had struck deals with three power companies - EDF, Drax and Uniper - to keep additional coal-fired power generators on standby in case they are needed.
It will also launch a scheme from 1 November which incentivises businesses and households to reduce their electricity use at key times.
With these measures in place, National Grid thinks that supply interruptions would be avoided. However, it said it had modelled a second, more extreme scenario, in which the energy crisis in Europe escalates, resulting in not enough gas being available in Britain.
In that event, distributors would be forced to cut off electricity to homes and firms for up to three hours during the day, it said.
Is there an alternative to an uninterruptible power supply? If outages are planned, the nodes can be shut down and rebooted, automatically or manually.
If there’s no alternative to a UPS , can someone please dm me and propose some products for home use of just two nodes on an RPi4? Best for DE, AT. thx
you can use 12v power supply with battery backup, and then with Car USBconverter convert it to 5v, External hdd also use 12v. Somesure consumption on 12v, then you can know how long it las on battery and how much AH you need.
There are plenty of UPS options available that would be sufficient to bridge a few hours of power outage. Of course it would be a good idea to not leave any monitor on but operate the node headless. The nodes setups that have the lowest power consumption will of course survive the longest power outages. Please remember that you would also need to connect your router to the UPS in order to avoid going offline.
People who live in countries that have unreliable power in general already know that a UPS is an essential item to have for keeping important appliances working, also during thunderstorms.
If there are planned power outages though, how do we know for sure that network related infrastructures will still be powered during cuts?
With a UPS I guess it would still be better for nodes as they would not get abruptly shut down, but if Internet is down too because ISP’s equipments aren’t working, it’s not gonna help much with regards to online scores…
Like @Bivvo if anyone knows of a way to automatically shut down and power up some RPis when current is cut/restored, I’d be interested to know
Yeah I’m more concerned by the abrupt shutdown rather than keeping it running through a 3hr power cut.
I’m thinking of picking up an “Amazon Basic” UPS for around £100 mark that will support up to 300+w which should cover my setup and give it a “safe shutdown”
I’ve not used any of the above PSU’s but should give you an idea of what you can get, So you have got a bit of time to do some better research to find items that cover your specific needs better.
From an engineer pov this sounds like bad storj system design, if additional 100 bucks are required to safely shutdown the system. This will need another 4-5 months or so to recover the hardware cost. cc @Pac
Main issue is not the online time / score, but the interrupted writing of data and the corruptness of files, right? Which will lead to audit issues later on. I would expect that the system recognizes such shutdowns and tolerate broken pipes / remove them and let the uploader finish the job on another node.
Online times are in the hands of the SNOs, as they should be aware of downtimes in order to let their machine(s) restart, as soon as the internet connection + electricity is back.
Is there any other risk? Maybe hardware (hdds) defects caused by power outages? On an RPI: could this be handled with a usual smartphone battery pack somehow to “docker stop” the node and unmount the drives? 2-3 mins should be enough to do so. thinking
I’m with most others here, if you can afford it, get a APC 1500VA or 750VA model for your network equiptment if your also going to have a small nas on it or low power computer. I work in a tech support shop for business and we have a 1500VA running our internet mode, router, switches. Yes the APC size is a bit excessive but we can have our power out and still be online for hours. Also having a APC on our computers we can still work for a while, the computers go down way before the network equipment goes out due to the power load.
Food for thought.
100% agreed! I only put my input in because this may also be a part of quality of life outside of Storj. Where we live in online world where our POE security cams upload video footage, wife and kids on their ipads want internet all the time, IOT thermostats… blah blah blah
To be honest I have hard shutdown my storj computer many many times and never had a data corruption to this date, yes rolling the dice baby.
Anyhoo, I really hope you guys and gals in Europe don’t have too many energy issues this winter!
Have a look on Ebay, Gumtree etc. Sometimes people sell them cheaply when the batteries are flat.
I bought an APC Smart-UPS 1400 for £1 off Ebay 2 years ago and only needed to replace the batteries for ~£50. Though I needed to replace the batteries after 2 years again. But my server doesn’t run only for Storj, so the cost is justified for me.
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