If you can afford one, I would strongly recommend going with a dual-conversion UPS. A line-interactive UPS like the one you posted essentially acts as a pass-through for your mains power until it detects a power loss or a brown-out. This works most of the time, but there’s a short delay during the switch from line to batteries (just guessing, but most likely on the order of milliseconds). This might not sound like much, but you’re counting on the capacitors in your server’s power supply to hold enough charge until the UPS kicks in.

The other thing to consider is that a dual-conversion UPS also supplies “clean” power to your equipment. It essentially acts as a DC power supply connected to an inverter, so regardless of how bad your input power is, you’re always going to get the correct voltage and frequency out. I connected my old line-interactive UPS to a cheap generator at one point; the voltage and frequency regulation was so bad on the generator that my UPS continually switched on/off of battery (several times per second), and the equipment attached to it immediately shut down.

I can connect my dual-conversion UPS to the same generator, and it keeps humming along as if it was connected to mains voltage. According to the datasheet, anything from 60VAC to 150VAC, it’s still going to output clean 120V/60hz power.

They’re much more expensive. Mine is 1000VA, and if I remember correctly, I paid something like 600 or 700 USD for the UPS. An add-on rackmount battery pack was another $300 or so. It was well worth the cost, though.

What devices are you using that support 3x3? My APs are set to 3x3, but every device I have ever tried only connects at 2x2.

I testing this after reading your comment. A few feet away from one of my APs, I got about 550 down, 650 up. 15 feet away through a single wall, I get 250. I had no idea a 5Ghz signal falls of that quickly.

Depending on how accurate you need your energy usage data to be for individual devices, you might be able to get away with just using a whole-house energy monitor. I’m using one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LV8DDFP

I already have a large number of Zigbee plugs, so by looking at the power usage from my energy meter before and after one switches, I can get a general estimate of how much power a device is using. Of course, the rest of your home is going to to skew the results, but you can mitigate this a bit with some of HA’s statistics functions. It’s been a while since I tried this, but I did test it with a 3.5kW heater a while ago. I took a median from a certain number of samples before and after the heater switched on (I think 10 seconds worth of samples), and the result was generally accurate to within about 100w.

In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.

My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.

This seems like a weird and convoluted way to charge for content. Why not just make it a paid DLC?

I think one thing that’s very important for the worldwide audience to consider is what the involved countries count as “peace.” Peace for Ukraine is “give us our land back and stop attacking us.” Peace for Russia is “We’ll stop attacking you if you let us have a significant portion of you country as our own.” Obviously, the Russian “solution” is not an acceptable one. Sadly, I feel like China and other Russian-aligned countries probably support the distorted Russian version of “peace.”

What do you mean specifically? If I’m already testing between two VMs, doesn’t that already isolate any issues to Proxmox? Is there another performance metric you think I should be looking at?

When I use OpenSpeedTest to to test to another VM, it doesn’t read or write from the HDD, and it doesn’t leave the Proxmox NIC. It’s all direct from one VM to another. The only limitations are CPU are perhaps RAM. Network cables wouldn’t have any effect on this.

I’m using VirtIO (paravirtualized) for the NICs on all my VMs. Are there other paravirtualization options I need to be looking into?

It was a good suggestion. That’s one of the first things I checked, and I was honestly hoping it would be as easy as changing the NIC type. I know that the Intel E1000 and Realtek RTL8139 options would limit me to 1Gb, but I haven’t tried the VMware vmxnet3 option. I don’t imagine that would be an improvement over the VirtIO NIC, though.

Every VM is using VirtIO as the network card; they’ll all on the same bridge to the physical 10Gb NIC. As far as I understand, any traffic between VMs should not be leaving the Proxmox server.

I’m old enough to remember the 9/11 attacks. It was never in question that Saudi Arabia was complicit in what happened. The majority of the terrorists were Saudi. It took a bit longer for the fact that the Saudi government was complicit to emerge, but we knew within a short time that at the very least, they provided financial support to the terrorists.

The argument for starting the “war on terror” was that Al-Qaeda planned the attack, so we should attack the countries that harbor them. At the time, the majority of the country supported this; I remember George Bush Jr.'s approval ratings being in the 90s for a short time. Even then, most of us knew that Saudi Arabia was at least complicit in what happened. The lust for revenge, as much as it was justified, made people forget that.

Over the last 23 years, I feel like a lot of Americans have forgotten the role that Saudi Arabia played in the events of 9/11; after all, they’re our “ally,” right? I have always been on the fence regarding whether or not invading Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea. Back in 2001, though, I felt like invading Saudi Arabia was a great idea. 23 years later, I don’t feel any different. Should the United States have attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d say “probably”; should we have attacked Saudi Arabia? Absolutely. Yet it never happened.

I’d like to hope that by the time Win10 is no longer supported, we have Win12 that doesn’t suck. The way things are going, though, I doubt it. I’m expecting that Win10 will be the last version of Windows I use.

I still prefer Windows over Linux for gaming and software development, but everyone has their limit. I am strongly opposed to advertisements, and when I can no longer block ads from my operating system, it’s dead to me.

I use a mixture of Linux and Windows 10 LTSC on my PCs/servers/VMs. I will be the first to admit that Windows does sometimes make sense to use. My desktop PC and my dev environment are both Windows 10.

That being said, what is the advantage in using Windows 11 over 10? As far as I can tell, it’s worse in every way. Built-in ads, a crappier UI, forced obsolescence with TPM requirements, and “feature” bloat that nobody asked for.

10 was a clear improvement over 8, but 11 just seems all-around worse.

C++ is just as “safe” as Rust if you use modern language features (std::unique_ptr, for instance). I would argue that anyone who says Rust provides better memory safety than C++ most likely is not familiar with modern C++ and still sees the language as “C with classes.”

This is certainly good news, and I don’t intend to detract from it.

That being said, my opinion as an American is that the kind of missiles we need to be sending to Ukraine are the nuclear kind. The Russian government has said that they will use nuclear weapons in the event that the existence of their country is threatened. Fine, I understand that. Ukraine needs to have the same leverage. The existence of their country as they know it is being threatened; it would certainly turn the tables for them to say “Yes, we have nuclear weapons, and we’ll only use them if our continued existence is being threatened. By the way, you’re threatening it; you should really stop.”

This is looking more and more like my best option. I guess I can just buy an AC and run it with thr on-board temperature control until I have time to build and integrate an ESP board.

I have heard the same thing about ACs, but I think it depends on the unit. The window units that I use have a switch on the front that literally just turns them off; there’s no delay time for the compressor. It’s the same as pulling the plug.

I’ve used single and dual-hose portable ACs in the past, and I only have dual-hose units now. This is purely anecdotal, but when I had single-hose units, they would maintain the temperature throughout the day as it warmed up, but they didn’t do a great job of cooling. A dual-hose AC with a similar capacity was actually able to lower the temperature.

I did some research on this, and it turns out you’re absolutely correct. I was under the impression that ECC was a requirement for a ZFS cache. It does seem like ECC is highly recommended for ZFS, though, due to the large amount of data it Storrs in memory. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable using non-ECC memory for ZFS, but it is possible.

Anecdotally, I did have one of my memory modules fail in my TrueNAS server. It detected this, corrected itself, and sent me a warning. I don’t know if this would have worked had I been using non-ECC memory.

One thing to keep in mind if you go with an i5 or i7 is that you won’t have the option to use ECC memory. If you’re running TrueNAS, you’ll need ECC memory for the ZFS cache. A Xeon E5 v2 server is old, but still has a more than enough power for your use case, and they’re not particularly expensive.

If you need something more powerful, you can find some decent Xeon Gold systems on eBay, but they’ll be a bit more pricey. The new Xeon W chips are also an option, but at least for me, they’re prohibitively expensive.