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Power woes

January 25, 2021 — Tristan B. Kildaire

The problem

We have a government situation (that's no new surprise) but the problem here is typical of where I live, South Africa. Ineptitude, hiring without merit, and greed and corruption and zero accountability. The problem is that our energy supplier, Eskom, has power delivery issues (search "load shedding" on Yacy of DuckDuckGo) and you will see what it is. The problem is only worsened that it is illegal to operate a privately run power energy company and turn a profit. Had that been allowed, BEE aside, we would most likely be better off than where we are now. So the result is rolling black outs and basically no fucks given - feels very African to be honest. What I call pre-Venezuela.

Our reaction

The coup. Oh shit wrong script. Basically we have a generator but the main problem is that it doesn't have a UPS attached to its power supply feed so we have to flip over manually from Eskom power supply to our generator when this happens. As you can imagine that means all of my devices are powered off which is something I would like to avoid. What I do now is that I simply turn them off before the schedule for load shedding activates and even that I would like to automate if possible (my friend Thomas is working on something that could get the relevant data needed for such a watch-daemon) but at the end of the day higher uptime is what I really want.

What parts of the house do stay on during power off? Well a few things. My desktop does and one monitor and all peripherals:

   

Back of my power supply. It is actually quite nice as it supports            This is the front of the UPS. Just a power button to activate it
USB monitoring, it also has some telephone jacks which are used         such that when ever the power goes off it starts supplying power
for some sort of reporting system I assume (by dialing a number)         from its battery and when the power is on it supplies from mains
and then the power outputs are two C13 connectors and one normal    (Eskom)
South African electrical outlet (this last part will come in handy later)

The other parts of the house that stay connected are in the study area, where we have our main switch that connects to our router (a mikrotik on the roof). So we recently purchased this UPS just to keep running one of the wifi access points we have (a Mikrotik too), the ethernet switch (the main one) and the POE injector which then power the Mikrotik router on the roof. This is enough to keep the network up and running in that room basically and anywhere where said wifi reaches.

         
The whole study setup as described above.                                                                                        The UPS powering all three devices (two of which I require)

       

Back of the UPS. Here it connects one standard 3 pin plug (the red little thing is the red             Pictured here is the POE (power-over-ethernet_ injector which connects to the switch and
plug), the other two two pin plugs connect to the Ethernet switch and the routerBOARD             the router on the roof (supplying it power over the black cable). The switch, a DLink, is seen
access point. The bug red one provides power to the POE injector (which powers the router       at the back.
on the roof (also a Mikrotik)).



The routerBOARD access point providing the study and the surrounding rooms with
wifi network access.
You can see a tour here.

So in terms of Internet we are sorted as I have shown, my router stays on and that is all I need in that respect (in that part of the house). However, what I now need is to keep my equipment powered on. So we will start in my room. I have a desktop and I'd like that to stay powered during the intermediary power offs (that's a check then as that is already done). The first thing I would like to have powered on indefinitely is my machine deavmi.home.pi - this is my personal machine for my quassel core, my webserver and a few other things. Basically a personal server (but not for development related things). I may upgrade it to a faster RaspberryPi in the future but for now it will do - it also has a nice HDD attached to it. The second thing that needs to be powered, although not shown in the photos, is the powered USB hub that connects to the Raspberry Pi and connects the 1TB Freecom HDD to it - that too would need to receive power such that it can stay online with the Pi and not result in some sort of VFS unmount caused by the USB disconnection of it due to power loss (as it cannot run on the power supplied by the RaspberryPi's USB power lines).

The next thing that needs to be powered to insure that at least my Pi can now not only stay online in the power sense but also online in the networking sense is for the switch that is connect to to stay powered as well. This too is possible and will result in a total of three things remaining powered on.

           
The Raspberry Pi can be seen to the right of the photo. My Mikrotik routerBOARD switch                A terrible blurry photo of behind the devices. You can see the power connector for
is the white device to its left and connects to the switch in the study. It's a smart switch which          my Genius switch too, or at least the back panel, and the barrel connector to the Mikrotik.
is really nice as you can see the MAC-Port table for mappings etc., manipulate it too and
much much more - I mean you can, if you run the betas, run WireGuard on this damn thing
- that's super handy! Or GRE!


Last but not least there is a tour of my personal setup here.

That's all the personal devices.... what about the infrustructure?


Yes so the infrastructure is another thing - other than my personal devices I run stuff that is critical to the uptime of several services and the networks I run (CRXN more so than BonoboNET). I need to first and foremost
keep my three RaspberryPis running. These are two routers for my allocated subnets of CRXN and then the other is my NGIRCD server for my lockdown.bnet node.

           

The power strip for main power delivery. It connects to one of the ATX towers        The back of the ethernet switch and its C13 cable. You can also see my
and another power strip. All Pis connect via this power strip. So does the                nice (for a shelf mounted rack) cable management of the overhead ethernet
monitor and the main Ethernet switch.                                                                        cables.


       

These are 3 out of the 4 ATX C13 power connectors to the machines that            This is the secondary power strip which connects to the one at the top.
run some services on Yggdrasil, CJDNS, CRXN and the clearnet. It also               It connects the C13 to the ATX towers as shown in the image to the left.
includes a machine of mine that is my IPv6 router.


       

The ATX machines needing to be powered                                                              My Raspberry Pis that I want to sort out power delivery for first and then
                                                                                                                                  move onto the ATX machines. The left hand Pi is my 10.1.0.0/16 CRXN router
                                                                                                                                  and 10.0.0.0/16 to the right hand side. The middle one is my lockdown.bnet
                                                                                                                                  node.
Last but not least there is a tour of my infrastructure here.
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