this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
151 points (99.3% liked)
Privacy
3366 readers
22 users here now
Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.
Rules
PS: Don't be a smartass and try to game the system, we'll know if you're breaking the rules when we see it!
- Be civil and no prejudice
- Don't promote big-tech software
- No apathy and defeatism for privacy (i.e. "They already have my data, why bother?")
- No reposting of news that was already posted
- No crypto, blockchain, NFTs
- No Xitter links (if absolutely necessary, use xcancel)
Related communities:
Some of these are only vaguely related, but great communities.
- !opensource@programming.dev
- !selfhosting@slrpnk.net / !selfhosted@lemmy.world
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !drm@lemmy.dbzer0.com
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Sir, why is your usage so high? Are you growing drugs?"
"No, I'm just running my own data center in my basement."
I actually am doing that kinda, I have an always on server running in my apartment (no basement)…
Same. I have an 18 bay Poweredge running 24/7.
42U rack
A large workstation with 5 drives and two video cards.
2 NAS,
a large POE switch,
two small POE Switches,
8 workstations (4 users, 4 small servers)
decent sized router.
My power bill says I use 90% more power than my neighbors.
2 AC units.
I have 2 1U Dell servers I want to install, but my power is already pushing 500 a month in the summer.
Or charging an EV with a level 2 charger. That's going to be numerous kWh each charging cycle
Something like that wouldn't be flagged as suspicious. If you were using a large amount of power for 16 hours a day for a few months and then for 12 hours a day for a few months, that would be suspicious because that usage profile matches a marijuana grow.
They can also "fingerprint" certain power usage like a refrigerator and filter out that noise from the power usage profile to eliminate other innocuous things to build a stronger argument that an illegal grow is happening. The profile of an electric car charging plus tracking data on your phone would eliminate the power usage from charging as being suspect, but that would require a competent detective actually doing their job properly...
Grow autos and have 24/7 lighting. There’s more than one way to avoid even competent detectives.
Obviously you can grow a TARDIS, but cars? Didn't know that.
Nobody they are concerned about grows autos and the market for those is as small as those plants.
Yes, I know autos aren't tiny anymore, but they can't pull 4 zips off of one as easy as an actual strain.
? There’s no difference between the end yield of autos and photoperiods. They even flower faster so you can get more.
These aren’t you grandparents genetics.
Also, why is the market different? Bud is bud lol.
The amount you get off a plant is directly tied to interstitial node density and number, which autos can't control. You have to do twice as many harvests to yield the same weight as a photo in the same period.
Not to mention you can't clone autos, so your genetics are way too variable.
For personal use autos are a nice and easy option, not for commercial chasing consistency and yield per dollar. Some commercial growers will do auto for res, but all the flower grows are photos for good reason.
Remind me to look at both of your power meters.
Photos can veg longer, that’s why they have more nodes, which takes longer. You can have an auto done flowering in 6 weeks for harvests, most photos are 10. Autos can also grow for 6 hours more during veg, and 12 hours more during the night. These factors all help make it have the same yield in the same time frame.
And when avoiding the cops you do whatever you can to avoid it, autos were essentially created for this exact reason dude.
Also, if you arent feeling those cassandra vibes hard rn, thry absolutely have detailed tracking data on your phone.
I literally do. Two DC Gigabit switches, a ProLiant DL360 Gen9 with 500-600W peak power draw, a Workstation with a Xeon E5-2680v4 and a 1070, so another few hundred W. Another DL360 Gen9 is probably not that far away, and external drive enclosures are needed even more.
If you want data center vibes and grow house power usage your next upgrade should be an sfp+ aggregation switch for those servers, 1G switches, and your router. Then you can run copper DACs or even fiber if you want to get fancy.
My goal is to wire my fiber internet connection to my server with SFP+, but I also want to access it (eg. the iLO) via that fiber connection when the server is off, so I'd need to rely on my old copper internet for that. But then it's not really redundant. So I do still need a proper router, and idk anything about enterprise routers lol
I’m a big fan of MikroTik for enterprise grade routers without the subscription/licensing shit, and at a much more affordable price than stuff from Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc. I have my ISP router set up in bridge mode, so it just passes all traffic through to my MikroTik router. Then the firewall stuff is all on the Tik.
You can hook the server’s NICs up to the sfp+ switch, but still connect the ilo to the copper 1G switch. So you still have router on stick to sfp+ switch, then 1G switches both connect to sfp+ switch. If you want to dive into ospf or stp/rstp you can create loops, so wiring the switches to each other and all to the router, but theres obv some more configuration stuff to learn with all that.
Idk maybe I’m misunderstanding. In the spirit of the original article, you should add another server to your lab and run eve-ng bare metal on it so you can simulate huge network topologies before buying new networking gear and make the cops think your grow op is even bigger.