Last updated: 2025-09-06

Resilience Setup (Blackout-ready)

My setup may look strange: not the most powerful, not the newest, and definitely not the kind of shiny gear IT people usually show off. Where’s the Mac Studio on M4? It’s not here — and there’s a reason.

Russia’s war against Ukraine brings not only frontlines but also regular missile and drone attacks on our energy infrastructure. Ukrainian power engineers are no less heroic than our army: they restore electricity in record times and often under fire. And yes, scheduled outages like “4 hours off, 2 on” or sudden blackouts for half a day do happen — but we’ve learned to live with that reality, to adapt, and to keep working at full capacity.

My desk is built to gracefully survive these “temporary” outages. For up to two hours (on powerbanks) and a full day (on a portable power station) I keep running my entire stack without changing a thing. If it goes longer, I can still work for up to six full workdays by switching entirely to my laptop.

At the core of it all is a lightweight and compact MacBook Pro 14". It’s my central node: I can pull it from the desk with one hand, move to another city if I have to, and not lose a single beat of work.

More than that — this setup turned out to be unexpectedly convenient. For business trips, conferences, or meetings I don’t have to “prepare” anything. Everything is already with me, ready to go. I use this all the time, and honestly, I don’t even want to switch to a “proper” heavyweight system anymore. The current setup is simply too convenient.

Key Machines

MacBook Pro 14"

  • CPU: Apple M1
  • RAM: 16 GB
  • Storage: 1 TB SSD

Lightweight, compact, always ready for the road. Performance in one word: enough. It doesn’t break speed records or grab stars from the sky, but it does everything I need reliably.

On my desk it usually sits closed in a vertical stand, connected to an LG UltraFine 27". A small but important detail: this monitor runs on 19 V and can be powered directly from a powerbank over USB-C with Power Delivery. (Yes, and if you’re on macOS without BetterDisplay, non-5K monitors tend to turn into pumpkins.)

I use Apple’s wireless keyboard and trackpad — no mouse. And yes, I do look suspiciously at Mac users who still use a mouse.

Orange Pi Zero3

  • CPU: 4× ARM Cortex-A53
  • RAM: 4 GB
  • Storage: 128 GB SD card
  • Power draw: ~2–2.5 W idle, up to ~5 W peak (depending on load and peripherals)

This tiny board runs most of my PHP projects for testing. Yes — inside Docker Compose I spin up everything I need: databases, websites, message brokers, API gateways. The board isn’t overpowered, and that’s the point: if you misconfigure something or write inefficient code, you hit its limits instantly. I like to use it as a “performance litmus test”: if your solution runs decently even here — congratulations, take a cookie, it will fly on real servers.

Firebat T8 Plus (Mini PC)

  • CPU: Intel N100, 4 cores
  • RAM: 16 GB
  • Storage: 512 GB SSD
  • Power draw: ~6–8 W idle, ~18–20 W peak

I chose this box specifically for energy efficiency. Sure, I could have picked something beefier, but surprisingly this machine is already a “real server” — stronger than some cheap VM instances in the cloud. I like to re-check solutions here: it should be significantly faster compared to the Orange Pi. If it isn’t — bad sign, give the cookie back.

But sometimes the opposite happens: a solution that is architecturally correct, cleanly implemented, and well tuned shows the same performance on both the Orange Pi and this mini PC. That’s something special. It means there’s a hidden bottleneck or design aspect worth digging into — and those moments usually give the most valuable experience.

“Big” Tower (Ubuntu)

  • Mainboard: ASUS TUF GAMING B560M-PLUS WIFI
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-11600K (6C/12T @ 3.9 GHz)
  • RAM: 32 GB
  • Storage: 2× Kingston SSD 240 GB (RAID1), Kingston SSD 480 GB, Samsung NVMe 512 GB

Heavy artillery I bring in to simulate realistic systems. For now, it’s enough. This box is not critical — I could easily replace it with something else if needed. It’s tuned for silent cooling, so for me it’s “almost silent”. My wife disagrees — she hears it and sometimes secretly powers it down. Usually I only notice a week or two later.

Networking

  • Asus ZenWiFi XD6 + XD6s in AiMesh mode.
    Main node antennas underpowered (to save watts), secondary node at max power.
    With power — everyone uses the secondary node with strong signal.
    No power — everything fails over to the main node (USB-C powerbank).
  • TP-Link TL-SG108E gigabit switch.