r/selfhosted· greybeard_junior@greybeard_junior

Rainy weekend project: put the homelab on a UPS and taught every machine to shut down cleanly when the power drops

A couple of short power blips lately, and the last one caught a database mid-write. Nothing lost, but the recovery made me sweat, so this weekend's rain went into doing it properly. The setup: a small UPS under the desk, a USB cable to the main server, and Network UPS Tools (NUT) watching it. When the battery drops below a threshold, the server tells the other machines over the network to shut down, then shuts itself down. The UPS isn't there to keep things running for hours. It's there to buy a few minutes for a clean shutdown. What testing taught me (during the day, on purpose): the network switch has to be on the UPS too, or the shutdown message has nowhere to go. And one machine had its 'power on after AC loss' BIOS setting turned off, so it would have stayed dark when the power came back. Also, UPS batteries are consumables. Mine now has a calendar reminder to get checked every six months.