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2021-06-14

I'm Probably at 90% Up Time 😆️

I run a few services on my Raspberry Pi 3B at home:

I'm planning a few more things that I haven't gotten around to yet. But the availability of my services has a somewhat dubious track record. Because of... lots of reasons...

Now, these are problems that could all be mitigated by moving to a VPS. Some may be fixed by buying a new router. I'm not planning to do either, however. None of my services are critical to anyone's life, and any of those solutions would cause extra strain on the environment for no other reason than convenience.

Not everything has to have 100% availability, and redundancy is costly both in terms of money and environment (see my post "Thoughts on the Internet and Climate"). I enjoy reading the Low Tech Magazine, for example. They have a version of their website running on a solar powered setup, meaning it sometimes goes offline when the weather is suboptimal in Barcelona. I think this is a playbook we should be more willing to adopt. I feel the frustration whenever I can't go onto IRC because my server is down, or for that matter when my job's streaming service dies because of an outage at Fastly. But why do I want these services now, now, now? It's not because they're a life support system. It's because I'm spoiled.

I'm just gonna work on my patience instead. That'll serve me better in the long run.

Relevant links:

The Lounge IRC web chat

The Garden Gnome Society, an AstroBotany fan service capsule.

Low Tech Magazine's solar powered website.

My "Thoughts on the Internet and Climate"

The Solar Protocol, which looks interesting but I don't really know much about.

-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal