Say ww3 kicks off and power goes off - how are you keeping your servers up? Solar panels and batteries?
What if there’s a biblical flood and you dont have the means to build an arc? All your servers are destroyed beyond repair?
What if you heard the Feds are coming to cart you and your servers away cos they suspect you of bad mouthing Emperor Tromp? (you’re on the run or subject to months of torture and yeah, you’re never getting your kit back)
What if theres a war and Luxembourg (you know, the enemy) let’s of an EMP pulse that kills your servers and all the infrastructure (power, internet…). How do you access all those cherished pics on Immich?
I’m not suggesting any of this will/can happen, its all just for lols, but have you made any contingency plans? Big binders full of printouts, bug-out bags, those flower-type solar things that track the sun, Faraday cages…
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My plan is to load up on canned stew and buckwheat.
Abut 35+ years ago, I stuck a finger up and didn’t like the way the wind was blowing. I decided to do something about it. While I am a prepper, I do not prep for EOTW scenarios. If we start dropping nukes, point me towards the blast cloud and let this universe recycle the energy it takes to keep this meat bag alive, into something else.
I do, however, prep for inclement weather, shortages, civil unrest, pandemics, etc. I have solar and whole house generators. I grow my own food, raise my own livestock, can and freeze my vegetables, meats, and such. During the pandemic, I rarely ventured off the compound as there was no real need to. I’ve long since turned my dining room into a pantry and it is well stocked and rotated. I stock medicinal supplies, things that would be needed in a disaster scenario, not gadetry. I have taught myself the skill of making very good alcohol, which can be used medicinally, and for barter. I stock a lot of staples, things that can be turned into multiple meals; flours, sugar, corn meal, etc.
I would say that my servers would be a minor issue or concern in a disaster scenario. I would most likely depend on Ham radio and CB communications, vs the internet. We would be back to living like say mine, or your, grandparents did. Very lean and close to the bone, relying on what we could scratch together to survive, such as Victory Gardens, etc.
We live in a world of convenience, and while that’s great and all, we get used to the notion that we will always be able to go to the grocery to pick up food supplies, and that is a false comfort. For anyone interested, I’d start with extending your pantry. Make wise purchases. Don’t fall for all the gizmos and gadgetry surrounding prepping. They’ll sell you a sack full of crap you’ll probably never use, or be useless when the time comes.
In that level of extreme disaster, honestly not going to be caring. But I did have a layered approach to less extreme more realistic scenarios.
Neighbors and Community
The most important thing in a real emergency. We know our neighbors, chat with them on the street and in line for the weekly ice cream truck. We have several close friends within an easy walk or bike ride and are part of a local social club that we go to every week. We’ve had the emergency chat with many of them.
Power
15 minute UPS on my NAS will get me through small power bumps. I also have a large backup battery meant for camping with solar panels that lets my partner and I go indefinitely without city power for our medical devices, with enough to spare most days to keep our phones topped off. I’m currently using it a a oversized UPS for my desktop, but in a real emergency I’ll shut that down and move it to the bedroom.
Longer term, we’re planning on getting solar+house scale battery. I had one before and it got us though multiple days without power as long as we were careful.
Food, water and general supplies
55 gallon food safe drum of drinking water with the tablets that keep it safe for years. I have a todo item that reminds me to rotate it out every three years. We have two emergency bins, one with a hand crank/solar/usb powered radio and flashlight and assorted emergency supplies. The other has freeze dried hiking meals. They were the cheapest per meal per year of shelf life last time I did the math.
Medications
A real gap. I can’t get more than a one month supply of my meds, similar for my partner. While neither of us have immediate life threatening problems without them, we’d both be in rough shape in different ways. Don’t know what to do about this.
Backups
My desktop, my partners laptop, the NAS, and my VPS all have offsite backups to another country halfway around the world. I test recovery annually, and use healthchecks.io to notify me if they stop doing their daily backup. I need to finish getting my laptop backup running, but it’s been low priority as I mostly use it as a thin client for my desktop and keep a few files synced with Syncthing.
VPS
A few critical services run on it instead of my at-home NAS in case our home internet connection fails. It’s physically located several hundred miles away. Again, backed up elsewhere so I can relatively quickly recover it if needed.
NAS
Hot-swappable 4-disk raid with a spare sitting in the closet. That should get me through most issues, with the offsite backups for things that don’t. It also pings healthchecks with a few daily self diagnostics.
RaspPi
Really just running PiHole, so the only data to back up is the split dns config which lives in my notes on my desktop. Seems like a weak point, but could be replaced by the NAS, router, or my laptop pretty quickly.
Mobile devices
Backed up to their corresponding corporate overlords, except for photos and videos which go to immich on the NAS. I wish I had a better solution here.
Me
I have a notes directory describing the setup with configuration, docker files and playbooks for the various services in a local git repo on my desktop. I have printouts of the assorted recovery codes and a letter explaining all this in my filing cabinet alongside my will and advanced directives. We have enough technical friends that my partner can ask one to help, or just point an LLM at the note files and have it walk them through most things. I’ve audited the notes and git history for credentials and it’s clean. Just IPs and machine names, lists of services on each, clean docker files and basic maintenance instructions.
I think my biggest gap is what to do in a dual-failure case where I lose my home internet connection, and my desktop ssd fails. My data would be safe in the offsite, but I wouldn’t be able to reinstall Debian. My laptop would let me take care of most things for a while, but maybe I need to set up a mirror…
“Today, the Apocalypse happened. All that we love and hold dear came to an end. Blood in the streets worldwide, panic, hunger, devastation reigns supreme.”
“What about my database server? Is it still up?”
None of it will matter. That said, short term FUBAR can be mitigated. I have a semi-portable solar setup that currently runs my internet, NAS, Fridge and to some degree, the A/C.
To prep for the serious mess, I have to get Faraday bags for my server, drives, and solar generator and have enough time to bag everything before the EMP hits.
I have survival guides in book form as well as on the NAS, and I work the land enough to bring the soil into balance and build its fertility, plus feed the bees so they’ll be there when I need them.
If this sort of event were to happen, I would have bigger things to worry about than my data. What use would it be anymore? What about drinking water and food? What about my ADHD meds? Shits about to get very twisted if I stop these meds. I fear for everyone else. In fact, if this sort of event was to happen, everyone should be worried about what happens when I’m not on my meds. Data be damned.
Anything personally important data wise has a backup stored in a container that won’t sustain liquid damage (and also acts as a faraday cage).
However, anything that is super-critical should the infrastructure around power, etc fail is just printed out as a physical copy on paper (first aid manuals, food cultivation/preparation techniques, how to construct and maintain water purification systems).
I’d argue that’s one of the least overkill ways to handle potential media restictions and geopolitical/climate disasters in our age, since all you need is a printer and maybe one or two secure cases for backup storage drives.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CF CloudFlare CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IP Internet Protocol LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
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I’m just gonnq start killing people
I hope to avoid the apocalypse, Armageddon and black Friday but I know I must eventually succumb to time.
Say ww3 kicks off and power goes off - how are you keeping your servers up? Solar panels and batteries?
My servers run on a power station and then solar panels with a battery.
What if there’s a biblical flood and you dont have the means to build an arc? All your servers are destroyed beyond repair?
I have a boat.
What if you heard the Feds are coming to cart you and your servers away cos they suspect you of bad mouthing Emperor Tromp?
Don’t live in the US. Servers are encrypted and backed up off-site.
What if theres a war and Luxembourg (you know, the enemy) let’s of an EMP pulse that kills your servers and all the infrastructure (power, internet…). How do you access all those cherished pics on Immich?
It takes A LOT for an EMP to fry electronics. The most important pictures can be printed. Already have a lot of albums. Some of my pictures is stored on discs.
In an apocalypse or an emergency, none of this stuff really matters though. You are better of making sure you have enough food, water and shelter. In almost any event, your servers are just going to sit there, waiting to be turned on again, when hopefully everything is back to “normal”.
I actually wrote a blog about this a few months back. It was after a 12 day war (Israel+USA attacking Iran) and 40 day internet blackout, and then we got into another war (Israel+USA attacking Iran) and a 90-100 day(lost track) internet blackout.
It isn’t exactly “how to survive the apocalypse” guide but it was a really helpful guide for myself and my friends and helped me keep working in those blackout days.
It’s isn’t focused on hardware, just software, since I’m a software engineer.
Grate share, thank you!
In most of those situations I have bigger problems to deal with and can always restore from backup later.
If it’s so serious I don’t even have backups left then it doesn’t matter anymore.
Die
My plan is “I’ll probably be dead” but if not, I have enough parts to cobble together a solar charging station, and keep my laptop running for a few days between needing to let everything charge back up.
I have one off-site backup on an hdd inside a faraday bag and waterproof case that I back up once a week(ish) and after every project. I have local backups daily, one in a faraday box.
I have never once needed any of them and honestly if shit hit the fan hard enough, I will likely never be in a position where having backups for digital information will matter again. I’ll probably at most have my old phone/battery/solar charger combo that’s in a case in the garage, I keep a ton of survival references, maps, and things like that on it.
