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Hacker News Hacker NewsNo private or public entity will grant access to valuable proprietary hardware, as unacceptable risks will not only come from building owners, but also from anyone entering premises.
Also, managing remote nodes evenly spreaded across all areas will be costly. Think of armies of techs on the road permanently, with access problem, dogs or pest barriers, and so on.
A way to solve this would be the allocation of a planned space per block everywhere, which would be safely secured - then available and accessible to all utility organizations: electric, isp, water, phone, data, etc. Heat, power, mini data centers, and such could serve all buildings on a block.
Then other problems emerges: having utilities plan and use these together. Would only work if all services belong to the same entity.
A way around, of course, would be for individuals to setup servers they would own, and rent to data brokers, like Holo project once planned for.
That said, my plex server for my friends is on an ups and I'm on 1Gb fiber and I have better uptime than AWS.
Why don't we all have small farms on our properties, turning lawns into vegetable producing land for each household?
Why don't we have small datacenters on the property of each business, so the business users and IT folks can keep track of their own servers and data and applications?
1. It depends on what part of the world you are in, but many homes have cooling needs for at least part of the year. The needs to remove excess heat would go up if you are adding more heat -- and it is less efficient to do this at the scale of an individual home than it is at DC scale.
2. Power requirements: While many homelabs have UPS systems -- they lack often lack backup generators, redundant A+B power infrastructure, and don't have the required power density for higher powered servers.
3. Connectivity requirements: most homes don't have access to the connectivity that data centers do.
4. Security requirements: homes simply can't meet the security requirements of most data protection regulations -- things like barriers, access control systems, surveillance, fire protection -- are anywhere from intrusive to completely impossible in a home.
5. Access requirements: homes aren't conducive to a technician responding to an outage at 3am
And those are just the big ones.
https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revo...
Without a truly zero-trust compute platform its going to be difficult to get anyone to trust their workloads to a random compute resource that isn't carefully guarded.
Without this widespread ignorance, and with IPv6, a global per host, and without the disappearance and massive price hikes of RAM and storage, we could all have a home server running, for example, a family's personal services:
- contacts (Radicale/Baïkal/Davis/*)
- photos (Immich, PhotoPrism, ...)
- video (Jellyfin and the like, even Stash for those who fancy it)
- files in general (e.g. SyncThing)
- email (fetched via OfflineIMAP and similar, served via Dovecot+webmail for those who want it, etc.)
- federated XMPP/Matrix for family and friends
- ...
And even for the State, a national blockchain for digital identity (NFTs), contracts (e.g. property sales, etc.), and money, with a node for every family and consensus to regulate it, for maximum resilience and reliability, thus also enabling electronic voting.
But well, given the widespread IT ignorance, it's just a pipe dream.
In this model, we would have de facto teleworking, and therefore de-urbanisation, with houses and sheds with solar panels on the roof, batteries, and activities shifted to maximise self-consumption—thereby electrifying without loading the national grid, in a true and substantial transition that would otherwise be unrealistic.
Personally, that's how my house is, national blockchain aside (but with a personal lightning node anyway), and it works beautifully; it would work brilliantly up to ~45° latitude across the EU and slightly less (I think, I haven't checked the PV maps) for North America. Simply doing this would kill off the aforementioned kleptocrats. No cities means:
- no end to private property for the majority
- no dependence on private collective transport in the hands of a tiny few
- no fast tech/fast fashion with very low costs for the vendor but high costs for the customer and nature due to the piles of waste
- no ready-meal deliveries with tons of packaging
A resilient, renewable society (including the built environment) that can evolve but doesn't have the majority enslaved to a tiny few. This is why it isn't happening.
District based heating is generally much more efficient than per building heating, and this side steps many of the issues that you would have installing/maintaining servers on your property.
Honestly my only concern is the impact of having a data centre nearby. They are asking for people to put a deposit down for the heating. I won’t encourage it, but I will make use of it if they put it in!
Nobody wants their home IP blocked because a neighbor's basement rack was compromised, let alone the liability for hardware or data breaches on their property. It just doesn't pencil out.
Not really the only issue actually, the electricity bill would be astronomical for a household and also have you heard the noise from them ?
Issues with them being distributed range from Data protection to Insurance against damage, connectivity issues. Noble maybe, but it's widely unrealistic.
If the user has AC for the summer, then running the AC in reverse for the winter will provide the homeowner with far more heating per joule than running a computer.
So the issue boils down to, there's not enough people living in places cold enough to make it worthwhile.
Of course, Id argue AI data centers aren't worth it full stop.
We'll be certainly less performant and less capable, but the data will continue to flow and business processes will proceed. If cloud data centers are destroyed, everything that's important to sustain us stops and we die.
If you ask nicely they give you fiber and vdsl combined with 2 fixed IPs for under 90€ a month. Means you can host everything from bind9 authoritative nameservers at home.
I like my homeservers. Heat. And also if the platters work on my hdds it sounds a bit like rain lol.
The problem is DNS and access to the IP network
So if you can figure out how to build reliable DNS access/approvals with cloudflare etc then it would work
The biggest challenge at the largest scale is political because then you’re gonna be fighting all of the ISP’s and the giant technology companies and ultimately they’re never going to allow for this
Either take it over on their own by offering their own service which people would sign up for
or they’ll just pressure every ISP or certificate authority to not recognize routes that are not going through “allowed” data centers,
most likely you would end up with a series of state bills or even a federal regulation that prevents data routing for public consumption unless it in some kind of “security standard” or whatever bullshit they come up with
In crony capitalism countries (US) or countries that have been governed by braindead "Das Internet ist Neuland" conservatives (Germany) and as such have less than 25% FTTB coverage, you can't run a data center.