Old fashioned, heavy handed and power hungry

That’s me according to my latest power bill, nothing like this to take a good long look at what you‘re doing wrong. Especially after I thought about myself as doing quite ok in this regard.

Stuff I run

I‘ll forego the normal things like the fridge here but focus on some tech-stuff that caught my eye when I looked a little closer.

• A HP Microserver running FreeNAS
• A Synology box
• Switches and other networking things

For these there we’re always interesting and more or less rational reasons when I bought them. This got me thinking if they are still needed though. Let’s take a tour.

Storage

Why are there two file-servers? This actually has some validity as one is my personal system and the other work-related. However: do I still need the personal one?

I bought the Microserver because space on my computer was running out, I wanted laptops to also have access and (leaving the last reason aside for a moment) SSDs of 1TB or more for inside my computer were still really expensive a few years back. Things have changed a bit: for what there is in terms of documents to be shared between systems there are Clous solutions, be they self-hosted or something like iCloud or Dropbox. The big thing remains a few hundred GB of photos. As it turns out I could perfectly well live with an external SSD (maybe a RAID enclosure) on that one since those can now be mounted on the iPad as well.

This leaves networking: here I have already taken measures. Prompted by some disappointment with the performance of PowerLine networking in my place I have replaced that with a mesh WiFi solution and already after some restructuring I was able to cut down by one switch (a 24 port HP enterprise switch no less) and a firewall. Not bad for a start.

A more lightweight future

I have some services I want running but right now I‘m thinking RaspberryPi for those as it‘s perfectly adequate for what I want it to do and consumes very little power. The Microserver might come on once per weer for additional backups or something like that.

Other then saving energy I actually think may well be a more enjoyable environment. After all there is a lot to be said for feeling less like a sysadmin at home.