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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 12th, 2023

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  • Always UPS everything. But also always have a simple backdoor. I generally have 1 little desktop like a NUC running some basic Win10 OS and an install of remote software like TeamViewer. It is connected to my hardware router right after the ISP router and a backup connection. Used to be LTE everywhere, now I’m half and half on Starlink. It is then also connected to the router ports needed for management but inactive.

    If I have to, remote into the NUC over Starlink. I can then reboot my main ISP box. I can eventually get into my router and enable those ports which are pre-plugged in. From there I can then access all the stack management and all the IPMI ports like iLo. It’s a virtual interface through a virtual interface. It is slow, and painful. But it works.

    And it works 99.99% of the time. But even then, I’ve had to do a call of shame and walk one of my friends through which button to press as I’m on the other side of the world. In my case it was also power related but the UPS I had decided to overheat. In reality over the summer, the temps were high. But also it is a super awesome double conversion UPS. The line voltage into the UPS was dropped to below standards from the utility because their grid was overworked with everyone’s AC’s. So the UPS saw this as a line failure, kicked in the double conversion and ran happily. But it did not count as a power failure, so none of my services scaled back. Essentially it was delivering 3KW of juice from the wall through a double conversion making the whole thing super hot. Eventually it shut down for safety automatically, just pulled the plug. My NUC is on a separate little backup along with the modems and an auto transfer switch which did its thing. But there was no way to press the reset button on the UPS for a critical safety shutdown like that. It had to be in person.


  • Hopefully the rack is mounted directly into the studs or concrete. I’ve seen them crush gypsum between the stud and paint too…

    I’m not much help, but they all suck. I’ve bought probably 2k worth of universal sliding rails to attempt with various servers. I don’t know why but none of them fit properly. None of them slide properly. They are all just annoying. I gave up with them. I bought the OE sliding rail kits for my various servers and magically everything works perfectly.

    For servers where I want to move them in and out but don’t want sliding rails, I just buy those universal L bracket type mounts. The servers slide well enough on them, they’re just powder coated bent steel. And a single screw from the front panel into the rack keeps it secure enough since the weight is being held by the support, not its own ears.


  • I also used them for years, then everything blocked and deleted instantly. I have other homelab type friends, same thing happened. Again more anecdote vs anecdote. But if you google about hetzner and this type of activity there are bagillions of reddit threads.

    After paying them about a grand a month forever, losing all my “safe data” and having to wait a week for even a response that just says “account has suspicious activity. Disabled”. Not a single response after that. And they had the nerve to charge my credit card again at the next payment period. Overall, truly scummy. And I will prevent everyone I can from ever engaging with them.

    When hiccups happen, you would hope to be able to at least talk to someone and figure out what’s going on. If they don’t want to keep your business, fine let me get it out privately. But they don’t play that way.


  • I use World Stream for many of my storage VPSs. They have pretty cheap servers that can take 14x or 18x drives. So I use their super powerful Epycs plus storage and then they can do an internal LAN only network for your boxes at 10G. 140TB to 200TB per box, connected to the rest of my stuff at 10G.

    Their support is opposite of Hetzner. Everything is communicated. It’s almost too much. You get emails that they’re updating the air conditioning unit in a different building. Your downtime is zero. I’ve had some questions on setting up my rack space with them, and engineers respond back, not sales.


  • You know what sucks? Getting your VPS shut off or account suspended. All your data gone in an instant, not recoverable. You don’t have access to the metal, and the metal no longer has access to you.

    Hetzner is known for randomly boinking accounts. You update billing info? Whoops maybe shutoff. You login via a VPN, account disabled. Just randomly for no reason, account locked and VPS down.

    You have basically zero recourse. Their support staff suck and the immediate reaction is suspend and delete. NEVER use them for anything you don’t consider temporary.




  • Not just unaffordable, just not available.

    That house where I needed to transfer data was in a neighbourhood only had copper phone lines from the 1960’s for DSL and then coax cable. The maximum possible was 400Mbps down and 25Mbps up. Over the years it was increased to 800Mbps down, still 25Mbps down. I paid over $1000 USD a month for that shit internet. Because the only alternative was 4Mbps to 8Mbps upload.

    This is a major metro area, 700k people. Starlink was a game changer. Not symmetric, but waaaay better.

    There’s only so much bandwidth on the cable line and they’ve spent ages marketing download speeds as the measure. If they go from 400/25 to 400/50, 99.9999% of people wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t pay extra. But make it 425/25 and people will buy. Bigger number more better.


  • Just start the backup and wait 3 months. That’s not that bad. Are you losing access to the data soon? If not, just let your auto sync take care of it piece by piece.

    I had an emergency situation where I needed to move the data and upload was 25mbps. Stupid cable companies not understanding why people need symmetry. It would take approximately a year of continuous upload and I didn’t have that. So I use 4 Starlinks, aggregated them to the cloud server with a VPN and now I had 225Mbps to 425Mbps upload. It took about 3 weeks but all the data was moved.