After being home for weeks, I went away for business, the 1st night away there was a brief powercut and the firewall (on a UPS) seemed to get stuck.
So, that’s no DNS, DHCP, or connectivity between wifi and LAN… All due to (admittedly aging) hardware issue.
Since then my entire home system has had issues whilst it all settles down.
It made me think about getting some redundancy into the system to handle a single failure.
So,.can you give me any insights into High Availability like CARP (for pfSense), VM failover (on Incus?), mesh wifi, Home Assistant, etc?
Of course there are going to be single points, like ISP line, etc, but seems like something to test out.
I have a multi wan SMB router. 945mbit throughput. $60 new.
TPLink omada or Ubiquiti tier stuff is all you really need for small business. The redundant ISP connections cost way more, but it’s still a tiny cost per month for something that can get the job done in a pinch like a hotspot.
Battery backups are only useful if you have a generator to take over the utility load imo. Not a common thing in small business unless you’re leasing somewhere with generators provided for the whole building.
Redundant servers are not that hard to have. Just need proxmox. It’s not as intuitive as old vmware but it’s more than enough for a SMB. Some kind of storage shelf and three little servers gets you a ton of redundancy. If a tiny budget is necessary and small downtime is fine you really only need a couple of hosts that are beefy enough to run everything you need on each.
Well…no, and this is what I’m saying.
Every downstream issue you try to solve with redundancy has a doubled and duplicate cost to it’s upstream. Internet links, load balancers for web services, and in this specific situation, UPS’s.
Throwing more servers at a homelab with no power is just wasting money without more UPS power in the mix. You have 4 servers, and want HA for everything on your network, expect to have two of everything, including UPS units.
This is the n* sunken cost of redundancy at its core, and in your example, you’re assuming this person even had a generator or whatever, but even if they did, they’d need an even BIGGER generator to run all this stuff.
That’s why my points deal with solving for what they have and making it work better than, instead, immediately jumping to adding more and more and more to the stack. It’s just not necessary when all they want is a graceful recovery to power loss.