Home Server Offline ☹️

Today, I woke up and noticed that my home server, located in my second flat, and also the router, all behind a 5G connection (that was showing as working fine on the provider’s website), were offline. No VPN connection anymore, and also Tailscale showed the nodes as being offline. I’m glad that I had automatic backups and was able to easily restore the three important services from that server on my VPS, without the need to travel to the second flat first.

It lets me reconsider if I even need to run that home server 24/7 anymore. After redeploying those services on my VPS, the main purpose for that server is running Home Assistant to show me the temperatures in all rooms of the flat and let me toggle some smart power plugs.

The initial reason why I bought this computer was to being able to code via SSH from multiple devices, and running that device was cheaper than paying for a well specced VPS. But since then, I bought a more powerful laptop that lets me do most things in Windows’ WSL 2.

Shutting that server down and using a less powerful Raspberry Pi for Home Assistant or even giving up on a smart home could save some bucks and watt-hours per year, but would leave me with two instead of one unused home servers. I already degraded my not so old desktop server to a home server, when I switched to a laptop as my main and only computer – but never really used it.

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