Introduction
My homelab is built for fun and learning, but also to power services for my home such as Home Assistant. The fun and learning part has resulted in a virtual firewall. So, I need to take care of my Proxmox cluster and keep it operational, otherwise internet will not work in my home. That’s not good. So in a sense, my homelab is a “production deployment”. Then there are the services I rely on and will come to rely on when built. I want to keep them safe if power outages should occur.
Requirements
My fiber modem is not in my rack with the rest of my home lab. So keeping internet running in case of a power outage is not a requirement. I “just” want my homelab to shut down gracefully after a short while. No need for hours of run-time on the battery.
I have a Conbee II USB stick for Zigbee that I’m going to use for a new install of Home Assistant. The last VM broke somthing after … a power outage. Apparently it’s a bit senstive like that.
The software solution
Network UPS Tools a.k.a. “NUT” is open source and supports many diferent UPS brands. It is very configurable albeit a bit difficult to get working. There are, however, great guides and Youtube videos that have helped me a lot getting it working.
Selecting the hardware
My homelab currently uses about 60 watts which made the following a good choice.
- Bluewalker PowerWalker VI 850 SHL 850VA / 480W 2x Type F Outputs It supports NUT and has two normal power outlets with no need for additional investments in a cable converter or new power strip for my rack.
Here’s what you need to get started
Visit my GitHub Cheat-Sheet repo where you can find my implementation of Network UPS Tools including rudimentary description and configuration files for the NUT server on a Raspberry Pi, NUT client for my Proxmox hosts and the NUT client configuration for my Synology Diskstation.