I’ve already got solar panels on my roof. Originally they fully covered our usage, but my wife and I have two EVs now (a BMW iX and an i4) and charge them at home, so we’re back to having to pay the electricity company.

I’ve got 1:1 net metering (grandfathered into an old plan) so don’t need batteries.

Makes sense! 30W is great for your system. My home server has an older 10Gbps NIC that uses an Aquantia AQC107 chip, which has poor support for ASPM and prevents the CPU from entering lower C states. I’ve been considering swapping it out for something newer (like an AQC113), I just need to work out whether it’s actually worth it.

Mine used to cost $0 in electricity since I’ve got solar panels, but we’ve got two EVs now (my wife has a BMW iX and I’ve got an i4) so we’re back to having to pay the electricity company again.

Creating a cluster could help me self host more websites I create as I want to move away from using hosting services

Just jeep an eye on electricity prices. This is probably not an issue with a phone server, but for me, hosting at home with a decent server PC costs more per month just in electricity compared to using a cheap VPS. Continuous draw of 50W 24/7 is ~37kWh per month which can cost $15 or more in California.

I do still host some things at home, but all my sites are on VPSes. The enterprise hardware and fast, data center grade internet connection is worth it for me. Some of my VPSes are only $40/year.

A friend is running Linux, Nginx, Hermes Agent, and a few other things on her old phone. Definitely doable! It’s a decent idea - very small form factor, phones have pretty powerful CPUs, and a lot of people have an old phone they’re not doing anything with.

I’m not sure about the Note, but the Samsung Galaxy S series phones have an option to limit charging to 85%.

Cycling the battery is a good idea too though. I used to do that with a wall mounted tablet and a smart plug, until I swapped it for a Lenovo tablet that has this as a built-in feature

is so rich that

Elon Musk is so rich that

I’ve got a Framework 16 and love it. Very good laptop and they have first-class Linux support. It’s unfortunate you can’t get one!

Failing that, the Lenovo ThinkPad business laptops (the T, X and P series) are good. For work, I’ve currently got a ThinkPad T1g, and used to have an X1 Extreme. Fedora runs perfectly on both.

It depends on what you set your swappiness to, too. I think Linux distros still have pretty aggressive defaults that swap more than they probably need to.

Yeah I shut down every day. It boots up fast enough that it’s really not an issue.

Even without hibernation, data in apps you have open will end up in the swap if your system is ever RAM-constrained.

It’s not as bad with LVM since LVM is more flexible. A swap file does still make it easier to change the size as needed though. If you need more swap, you can spin up a new swap file pretty much instantly while the system is running, without having to repartition. You can have both a swap partition and a swap file active at the same time though.

On systems where the data is encrypted, also encrypting the swap makes sense so I’m glad Debian does that.

I don’t use hibernation so I’m not sure.

I’ve seen so many setups where people encrypt their data but forget to encrypt their swap.

This is solid research, and this evidence is really going to put Sony into an awkward position.

Companies shouldn’t say you “own” a digital product if they can revoke the license at any time. Owning should mean something like when you buy a game from GOG - you get a non-revokable, DRM-free copy you can use indefinitely. Otherwise, you’re really just leasing it.

It’s mentioned on the wiki, but in California it’s illegal to use words like “buy” or “purchase” on the checkout page for licenses like this. They have to show a clear notice that you don’t actually own the product, which is why Steam added a banner on their checkout page.

People still use swap partitions instead of swap files?

Definitely true. The Pi 5 is especially powerful compared to older versions, but it can get kinda expensive once you add things you’d want for a server, like a case, SSD hat, etc.

Ex-office mini and small form factor PCs (Lenovo Tiny/ThinkCentre, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk, Dell Optiplex, etc) can be a better deal than a Pi. In the US at least, you can often find 9th or 10th gen Core i5 systems for less than $150 on eBay. Works great as a server.

A lot of companies have a 3-4 year refresh cycle, after which the hardware is fully depreciated (essentially meaning its value to the company is $0) and they have e-waste companies collect them. The e-waste recyclers test them, refurbish the ones that still work, and list them on marketplaces like eBay.

I forgot to mention - stay far away from SSDNodes. Their prices look good, but they massively oversell their RAM. They use ballooning (virtio_balloon) to overallocate RAM, and require you to use their customized Linux distro images that have it enabled. Ballooning means that they take unused RAM from your VM and lend it to other VMs to use. If you try to use all your RAM, they shut down your VPS.

GreenCloud, HostHatch, and RackNerd all let you install whatever OS you want, by mounting an ISO, connecting to the VPS via VNC, and going through the normal setup process just like you would on a regular computer. They do have pre-built images, but I always prefer to install from my own ISO so I know that the installation doesn’t have any non-standard modifications.

Thankfully, most VPS providers don’t oversell RAM or disk space.

My guess would be renting a dedicated server, or a home server. It can end up cheaper than colo.

self host?

Hosting at home, renting a dedicated server, or colocating are all considered self-hosting.

They’re reliable, but overpriced for what you get, especially after the Akamai acquisition. Akamai are not known for affordability :)