The mouse did not survive interrogation.
Also mouse not pictured.
Had a problem where my ports would suddenly close. At first I thought it was Telekom, then the modem, then the NAS.
After much investigation I discovered that restarting my router would solve it.
After some more weeks I discovered that the crawling bots were triggering some stateful tplink firewall that would close everything until rebooted.
So the router in the middle of the setup was the problem, not the edges.
Nice chonky heatsink, goddam
I used this, among other things, for my personal Blender renderfarm. Cooling was a must.
haha looks like you’re aaalmost at the point where water cooling is compulsory.
Is it a Threadripper? I built a couple of those for architectural rendering, such absolute beasts.
I honestly don’t remember now as this was over 10 years ago.
10 years!! aren’t you woried about dried up thermal paste? I think Re-pasting CPU/GPU every 2~3 years or so is a good practice to prolong longevity.
Ah, sorry for the confusion - that server’s been out of commission for a few years already.
I do not care to admit how many times when I was first getting into home labbing that I could not figure out why I could not reach a pi or the internet. All because I either killed an SD card for pihole or just plain out forgot to put one in!
I took my SD card out of the rpi to reinstall home assistant. Terribly annoyed because I had no backup of my configuration.
When reinstalling my SD I found out it was the ethernet cable that wasn’t plugged in.
I am so afraid of an SD card dying and killing my HA so I have a HD setup. I have one good SD card of the 10’s of cards I have killed and it is now running my ssh honey pot on a pi 0 2.
Yeah, that was the last iteration of the setup. I had two SD’s break before I figured out they aren’t suited for running high read/write systems. Lessons learned during homelabbing.
I should really make a dd image of my card for the Pi I use for all my switch serial connections.
for me it was the fact that the desktop case i used for the server had the power button on top and it was big enough to be pushed in, when my cat walked over it…
my cat currently loves hitting the “Sleep”-button on my keyboard every time he jumps on my table -.- at least i can wake it again, but it IS annoying. Haven’t had the time yet to reconfigure that button to instead run a soundfile of me scolding my cat lol.
One day, our internet just stopped working entirely. Our ISP was fine, router good, but no outside connection and I couldn’t access local devices. I have two Unraid servers. I took a quick glance at them, they were powered on, all looked ok. I decide to power cycle everything. Still no internet. Then I realize that I can still access Google from my phone when on WiFi… hmm. That would mean… an issue with pi-hole!
I begin to try to diagnose from my phone with a hotspot to my computer. I’m getting warmer but some things just aren’t making sense. I go back and stare at the server running pi-hole. Then it fucking hits me.
I have the pretty odd and totally not ideal home network. I have plans to upgrade everything but currently I have two wifi networks tied to the same WAN. One network is run off of access points so I can get Ethernet to odd areas of the property. The Unraid server hosting pi-hole was connected to an AP and the Ethernet cable I used didn’t have a clip, so it just barely unseated itself from it, breaking the connection. The router+pi-hole config meant also breaking the internet if anything happened to pi-hole or that server. I swapped it for a better cable and it all instantly started working.
Spent that weekend sorting out the network so it doesn’t happen again. It was definitely a head-scratcher.
Pihole is cool, but fucked me over as well more than once (not the pihole itself but the host). It’s on its own hardware now, but I plan to add a second one to reduce the single point of failure.
Haven’t thought of that tbh. Would they both just share configuration? Curious how leasing would be split/shared between them. Off to research!
I’ve been running two piholes for a few years:
I let the router handle dhcp, while having it hand out each of the piholes IPs as DNS #1 and DNS #2. Those piholes settings are mirrored using Nebula-Sync, so any change made to one pihole gets copied over to the other automatically.
Both of those piholes are setup to wrap outbound DNS reqests in DOH as well, with the router blocking port 53 outbound. So all DNS traffic leaving the network has to be DOH/DOT or it just gets dropped. Currently using NextDNS and quad9 as my upstream DOH providers.
Oh sweet this is super helpful! Doesn’t seem too complicated. Thanks!
@Darkassassin07 Looks very useful. Also timely for me. I have a use case that requires multiple synched pi-holes. 👍🏼
There’s some sync mode but I haven’t really looked into it yet.
Makes sense.
Yep I’ve had it randomly stop working if it has to serve clients outside it’s subnet
I mean, would you want it to serve clients outside of your subnet? I guess maybe if you had something like a guest network. But I tend to take the “fuck it, you get basic service and nothing else” approach to things like guest networks.
Isn’t it a potential security issue to have your pihole serve things on any subnet, because it allows an improperly configured firewall to stab at your pihole? I think you can specify any additional subnets it will serve in the settings somewhere. But IIRC, the default behavior is to intentionally drop traffic from unknown subnets. But that’s just off the top of my head.
I keep one Physical Pihole and one in a container, be sure yeah, this happens.
It’s always dns at least half the time
You don’t need a mouse for a server. Just SSH into it, duh.
Now now don’t sshush the server, it’s doing the best it can, okay? It gets hot in that box…
Well, if it could think outside the box every once in a while, that would be great y’know.
I hosted shit for about ten years before really understanding how local dns worked.
Imagine a primitive society that discovered literally every major modern scientific achievement, but somehow missed the wheel. That’s basically how my first setup went lol.
I have heard of local DNS multiple times now and been selfhosting for many years, but I’m good with my 192.168.178.39 :)
It opened the door to pihole and unbound, then dns certs, man… everything’s so nice now lol
Well hello there, fellow Fritz-Box user :D
I have a feeling there’s a point in time where most non-it self-hosters got fed up with ads and installed pihole, then learned about DNS. I have a feeling that started about five years ago.
Now it’s probably hand in hand with how necessary a pihole is.
I do not self host. I just wandered in here. Do you have suggested resources to learn more about DNS? I feel like generally searching shit sucks to get an answer like that lately.
A dns server knows what and where things are. That’s its only real job, to tell who’s asking where say, http://eff.org/ is.
“Ay homie, where’s https://eff.org/?”
over here - 173.239.79.200
“thanks, bud!”
The issue is, the dns server you use by default is under the control of whoever your provider is, and as a result, they get all of your dns lookups like the example above as well as every porn site, every piracy site, everywhere.
Installing your own, or simply moving to one your provider has no business with like 9.9.9.9 can help keep your dns queries more private, go a step further and use encrypted dns, as many providers supply, and you’ll be even further covered.
Installing your own, however, comes with the added perk of being able to apply your own dns entries. Suddenly local addresses can have custom names without ever touching a hosts file. Neat! Use DNS certs and you’ve got local SSL!
I would go find something applicable to feed you for a dns 101, but my old resources don’t exist. I just know stuff from years of doing it and failing over and over until things work.
Thanks man
Mine would be when I had a 48 bay disk array / JBOD fail on me… badly. After a storm, it killed the larger card that allowed for me to get many of the drives into a PCIe 16x slot, and I was relegated down to only getting ~8 disks per box made from spare hardware. A single box I got 16 going. Add to this mix an SSD for mid-line caching.
These were all running bcache on top of mdraid… One single mount.
Yes I understand how obnoxiously stupid it was to run RAID6 on a 48 disk volume. It was almost all just stuff I could re-acquire over time, not irreplaceable things.
I just HAD to solve this one though.
In come several spare chassis / mobo etc… get a bunch of drives powered and on /dev/ , move to the next.
A couple spare gigabit switches…
several gigabit NICs…
two explicit paths for each machine…
a bit of iSCSI magic, and one machine now had the physical disks all exposed to it… mdadm --assemble blah blah, bit of UUID chaos…
It’s surprising that while a bit speed limited (I think I got just around 110MB/sec reads), it was nicely performant for what a huge mess of wires and disks just strewn out around my rack.
Managed to evacuate all I needed without much issue once I got that going. Now, I try to keep my arrays under 16 drives at a time, or keep a very rigid policy of “I can lose this and don’t care” vs “this box gets RAID10 and/or offsite backups nightly”.
back up your critical stuff people!
48 disks seems a nightmare in power consumption, failure rate, and overall cabling management…
What was the total capacity?
Power isn’t so bad really. These were all 2tb disks, so ended up with about 40tb total after shenanigans.
Cabling was atrocious. I’d originally been using several pulled 4 disk SAS backplanes from servers thrown out of my work, just screwed down to some pine boards in a stack.
Zip ties and sata/sas cables were the rule.
Overall the drives had 4 small power supplies initially, 300watt iirc. Cheap.
Somewhere I have an old photo from the wiring during the “rescue” but I have to look around.
Disk failure was actually not an issue for ages before. A specific thunderstorm with 2 nearby tornadoes is what caught me this time. Before that, the occasional single disk every 6 months or so.
I still have running arrays using 15 year old disks, many with more than 10 years of that powered on. If you find good models, they can last ages.
I lost a raspberry pi for a couple months. Just couldn’t find the darn thing. It was working fine serving away.
Turns out it was in the basement. I forgot I moved it to be closer to my tilt Hydrometer.
To be fair, those things are really tiny!
YEAH it’s bash.org
Ooo, another bash mirror. Nice!
Oh, good thing you wrote this. I’m about to give one of my printers away and there’s still a pi inside
Cups?
OctoPrint (3d printer)
Also mouse not pictures
I was frantically searching for it, then i opended the post to See if the comments found it …
I’m sorry. Have this picture of a lime-hawk moth caterpillar I saw the other day.
https://plantmonster.net/pictures/phone/PXL_20260813_122831209.jpg
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DNS Domain Name Service/System ISP Internet Service Provider NAS Network-Attached Storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PSU Power Supply Unit RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
[Thread #80 for this comm, first seen 18th Aug 2026, 08:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box’s PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.
One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. “Must be a busted fan and that’s causing an overheating alarm” he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.
We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan… it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don’t exist there.
My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.
As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.
And this is the way bioinvasor species spread - most of the time they don’t come delivered inside of PSUs but simple crates, which improves their survivability lol
No mouse problem, but I’ve had to take measures to prevent cat-related downtime. Cats and power-button at the top is not a good combination.
Aha, I disabled the LEDs by unplugging them from the motherboard, you could do the same with the power sw plugs
Meowy Guard. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/molly-guard
When I had this problem I disconnected the power button on the motherboard.
Did you reconnect it everytime you had to power it on?
Nah just jam a screwdriver in there to jump the pins.
You shut down your PC though?
A lot of newer motherboards have a separate power button next to the case pinouts.
On one computer I had a recessed reset button, so I used that as power.
Another computer I added a wire to an external button double stick taped to the back of the monitor so I can turn on both at the same time.
You sound like you are one step short of wiring up a giant lever to dramatically pull down when you want to power on the computer.
Throw the second switch!
I would like and subscribe
Cant you just assign a different action to that power button instead of messing with it internally?
You can for a click, but no way for the long press, as that’s handled on a lower level
You got a point. Cats are sneaky 😅
yeah what if cat does a
sudo shutdown -r nowthen we’re really in troubleTaht’s too, but that would still be better than biting the cables.
That should recover. A sneaky cat will
systemctl reboot --firmware-setup.Or just run a cpuburn to ensure that temperatures will stay at cat levels.
Connect to spray bottle aimed at… well nope.
Instead of cat proofing, you were supposed to get a server room dog…
I have two server room dogs. An English pit, which is my seizure dog, and a Jack Russel. They shed, especially in the summer months, and the floor sweeper gets a daily work out, as well as keeping it out of equipment enclosures. It’s not that I hate cats, they are nice as a pet in your house, just not mine. LOL
They make sprung flip-top covers specifically for this reason. It’s just a little adhesive square/circle that you stick over the power/reset button, and it has a flip-top that automatically springs closed again.
Oh, my housemates’ cat hits the front power button when he leaps off my tower. I’ve got some leather taped over it. My uptime approaches 1! I love your little weight setup, too!
I have a small piece of acrylic sheet taped over the power and reset buttons on my server for that reason. At least I don’t have to worry about mice.
My radiator is on top so they’ve learned that’s about the only surface in the house where they’re not allowed to sleep
Not exactly self-hosting, but I’ve worked at two different academic labs that had unique issues and small budgets.
The first was on top of a mountain at 3km elevation. The low air pressure meant that all hard drives had a lifespan of no more than a year before starting to have issues. This was in the pre-SSD days. The “solution” was to boot from a floppy, never compress data, and have a student return the drives to a low elevation and swap them for the prior ones every six months.
The second was at a place that was using old Datacube MaxVideo hardware that we would never have the budget to replace. It would crash if the room temperature got above about 18C, so we set the thermostat to 15C. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you’ve tried sitting at a desk for 8 hours where everything is 15C and the heat is just slowly leaving your body into the chair, the desk, and the keyboard. And then you walk outside where it is 32C and instantly start sweating because you’re still in several layers and fingerless gloves.
Not selfhosting, but I remember standing in a server room with a hands’ width of water on the ground (and rising), and hastily shutting down servers where the water was already in the case. It were big towers (Compaq Proliant, if anyone remembers), and luckily the board, drives, and PSU were in the top part of the big tower cases, the drive bays at the bottom were empty.
We got all equipment out safely, and we did not get electrocuted, either. We left with the last equipment when the water level was approaching the knees.
Did you try turning the faucet off first to stop the water from rising while you were working?
The “faucet” was water literally streaming in through the broken window during a thunderstorm. One of my coworkers went outside and shielded the window with a wooden board to reduce the flow.
Reminds me of a time at my old job. It was a small office and this was before “the cloud” was a buzzword, so we had a little server room running a few boxes for AD, Exchange, and the thick end of our thin clients.
This “server room” was basically a large closet behind my office, retrofitted with its own AC.
We had residential units on the higher floors of our building. Residents occasionally thought to themselves “you know what makes a great hanging rack? Sprinkler pipes!” Hijinks ensued.
That was a fun call to get at 10PM.
Shoutout to the facilities guy who immediately thought to run a makeshift tarp over the server rack, fashioned from trash bags. No permanent damage.
