building your own mastodon server is stupid

[solarbird]

but, well, i have the dumb, so i made one lol

dunno if i'm gonna keep it yet but

@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net

Comments

[merelydovely]

It's cool that you're running it right out of your house! Do you have a whole server rack, just the one blade, a raspberry pi...?

I'm still in the 'thinking about it' stage but I was definitely thinking about making a tiny insular server for any twitter refugees from the fan servers I moderate.

[solarbird]

A... huh. Well... technically, yes, we have a server rack.

It's made of lumber. And it has computers on it. And a KVM. So it counts.

And it's a big upgrade from the old metal wire shelving with the open-motherboard compy we used to have.

This will make compy nr. 4 on the rack, and there's not room. I may need to buy smaller cases. This one is beige and from 1999! And the size of a small boulder. No, smaller than that. But.

[merelydovely]

o(￣▽￣)ｄ

All a server really is is a computer that never gets turned off, right? Basically?

Sadly we don't have that kind of space in our townhouse, but if I bought an actual server blade I could probably stick it in the closet...

[solarbird]

Basically, yeah. And unless they're graphics production servers, very little video capability. (You wouldn't game on them.)

Blades are noisy as fuck though, and surprisingly large.

Honestly, if you want to do something like that - specifically run a server for... most things, really... - and physical space is an issue, get a small microATX case with decent venting (better and higher cost, Fractal Torrent Nano, okay but lower cost Cooler Master Q300L).

Then get an microATX motherboard that is NOT specifically labelled for gaming, and, say, a recent i5-level processor with TDP less than 100 watts, and integrated graphics. (Intel: anything that does NOT say "discreet graphics required," AMD anything that's called an APU, iirc.) If you have a 65 watt max TDP processor, you're probably fine with the stock cooler. If you go over that, maybe go overkill on the cooler, but stick with air cooling, you don't need water. And the only reason I'm even saying that is because closet.

16GB of RAM will be fine for anything you want to run out of a closet - hell, 8GB would be fine really - and whatever storage you need.

NO graphics card, that's why you have onboard graphics.

That would run pretty much anything you'd want to run in a closet and take up meaningfully less functional space than a server blade. The only exception maybe would be if you wanted to also run a NAS on it, since it's nice to at least have the possibility of hot swapping hard drives if and when they fail.

You could still do it, and if you do, get a dedicated NAS card with hardware support, it'll be faster.

Then just make sure it has access to airflow (which is why I don't really recommend actual closets) and you're good to go.

You can get smaller than that if you have more money and want to learn more stuff. Size is all about the cooling. You can get a server down to the size of a PS4 without working too hard, you just have to know more about what you're doing. And you can get even smaller - hell, you could absolutely run a decent server for a lot of stuff off a NUC.

So size doesn't have to matter. It's more about the cooling.

[merelydovely]

Hmm, thanks. My husband is the tech guy so I'll probably just point him at this comment. That Torrent Nano would probably fit under my desk...

[wrog]

There's also the small matter of getting an internet connection with a static IP .

[wrog]

which is essentially the biggest ongoing expense for the server in my house (figure $25/month minimum; our bill is bigger because I have a block of 16 IPs at the moment and you really only need 1) and what was typically the biggest obstacle whenever I tried to encourage other people to run servers in their houses (admittedly it's been 10+ years since I last tried to do this).

Whether you can get it and whether you can get it without a whole lot of extra shit added on that you don't need will depend a lot on who your service provider is. Most residential providers are clueless about static IP. (theoretically, a bridged connection with a static IP is the simplest thing in the world but it's not what most people do, so it confuses them...)