Image Repository!
I’m hosting some pictures (some taken by me, some not) on this site now. Yay! There’s a rich backstory explaining how we got here, but if you’re here just for the pictures, here you go!
The rich backstory
Heinz Doofenshmirtz, Ph.D.
Nominal operation
For a while now I’ve been keeping a repository of photos on a web hosted file server at home, in California. However due to certain power companies shutting down power, there was no good way to keep the server up and running. You may recall in a previous post that I started this server about two years ago. Until now, the server has been running smoothly without a hitch, every so often it would perform a routine update and restart, but that’s usually a minute or two of downtime, nothing worth losing sleep over.
Problems & workarounds
However, as blackouts become more and more frequent as fires rage in near my home, it has become unfeasible to host anything on this server since it will just get shut off. There is a solution I’ve been meaning to implement. If I were to install a small raspberry pi on the network perpetually sending a wake-on-lan signal to the server, theoretically whenever the server was shut off due to power failure, once power is restored it would immediately boot up. Obviously, the raspberry pi itself would be battery powered, to make it immune to blackouts.
Why it won’t work
At this time though, I have chosen not to implement this solution for two reasons. One, I am studying at Purdue and will not be able to make it home until Christmas. So I wouldn’t be able to make it happen anytime soon. And two, even if I were able to immediately implement that, the extended blackouts and a spotty electrical grid mean the server would have tons of downtime, even if once power was restored it managed to turn itself back on.
And that’s a roundabout way of explaining why I’m hosting these pictures here now!