CY-X FORUM

i've been thinking about building my own server for hosting my own websites and files. is it worth the hassle and expense, or should i just stick with a cloud provider? i've heard that building your own server can be a fun project, but it also requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep. what are your experiences with DIY server builds? is it something a beginner can handle, or do you need to be a tech autist?

I run Thrashnet on an old AT system with a 400MHz K6-2 and 128MiB RAM running NetBSD/i386, no problems here. It runs the web server, IRC, NFS, FTP, etc all at once, while using about 35MiB RAM and 1% CPU on average.

depends on what approach you take, options are endless some are easy and some hard with their pros and cons, also maintenance depends what you want to do for example i haven't touch my home server in 2 years cause i don't have that many services.

>35MiB RAM
you're fucking lying

After pulling in an over 900€ eletrical bill it was time to lower my home based redundant storage system ambitions. I ran three headless worstations in a cluster. An HP Z400, a Thinkstations S20 and a MacPro 4,1. All of them with RAM upgrades, Operating systems in SSDs and several TB large disks in each of them. All while running Ceph (https://ceph.io/en/). It was great until I learned that power monitoring helps save some bucks...
Nowadays I realized that all computing needs to be exactly tailored to your needs. Do you want to host a Webpage? Well, initial traffic might be suprisingly low and show you suprisingly low RAM consumption. Running services by and for yourself can be really low cost. A simple RaspberryPi 3B+ with just a 1Gib RAM is really more than enough for several services like mentioned before:
Webserver, MySQL database, FTP Server, IRC/XMPP. As long as the user base remains low and no absurd loads are being processed things will run smoothly.

I run a RaspberryPi 3B+, an iPhone4 from home. I am fan of using older hardware as long as it is reliable and affordable.

So YES! Run your own server. Start small and scale your ambitions with actual usage justifications.
Going for big cloud operators should be no go for anyone who believes in an open and free internet. If not go for small hosting companies and help them out!

> you're fucking lying

Perhaps I read the "top" output incorrectly. Right now, it says:

CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.2% system, 0.0% interrupt, 99.8% idle
Memory: 35M Act, 17M Inact, 7020K Wired, 17M Exec, 33M File, 896K Free

I guess that actually means that 35M is being used for program memory and 33M for files? I am not really a Unix expert.

Irregardless, it works fine. I just added a FTP server to the system a couple of days ago.

I also made a typo in the original post, the CPU is 450 MHz, not 400.

>CPU is 450 MHz
how are you able to run all of that stuff without running out of resources? i can't even do much with my computer in the modern day but here you are somehow proving me wrong.

do you have any pictures of your setup that you can show off?

It's always worth it. If you own the hardware, that means shitty unannounced downtimes will only be your fault rather than the fault off some random worker who spilled coffee on a hard disk. If you're doing shady shit, glowies won't bother with you unless you go out of your way to let yourself get doxxed rather than let your cloud provider snoop on you and find your operations. VPS providers have a flaw where encrypted disks are inherently insecure because they can just look inside RRAM and find the encryption keys. Anyone who has access to your VVPS can fuck it up beyond repair, so if the cloud admin or a disgruntled worker or even as glowies got in and decided they don't like you, that means your shit gets fucked up remotely. Owning your own hardware solves this problem because only you should have access to the servers.

kryptik can you tell more about your setup or even screenshots?

>>51240
I haven't used NetBSD but reading from:
https://imil.net/NetBSD/mirror/vm_tune.html#terms
You are likely correct. I haven't used NetBSD and you might be using a version before virtual memory as described on that page was introduced, but active memory specifically refers to nonfreeable memory. Wired is probably included in that 35MB, and I assume the other categories are a mix between freeable and nonfreeable memory, which is why the numbers don't add up to anything that makes sense. If you have free -m (linux hello) or vmstat -s that should give you a clearer breakdown.

>>51231
It's hard to imagine, but software used to be made specifically to work under conditions like this. Technological constraints brews ingenuity. Today 35MB won't get you a new tab in Chrome.

I would say it is worth it. It's no real hassle to get one setup, setting up even a basic NAS would be beneficial, and there's a plethora of cheap Core2s or early Core series computers out there being given away for free, or next to nothing.
You will, at the very least, learn something.

> do you have any pictures of your setup that you can show off?
> kryptik can you tell more about your setup or even screenshots?

Sure. I have attached some photos in this post.
CPU: AMD K6-2 450 MHz
RAM: 128 MiB SDRAM
HDD: 640 GB SATA HDD
HDC: Maxtor SATA-150 PCI
OS: NetBSD/i386 10.1

The very convenient office PCs or School PCs can be transformed into a server if you can buy them from your local E-Waste dump site, or if you're still in school, you can go out there and get them for free if said school is okay with it.

it's totally fucking worth it if you're willing to waste a ton of time with maintenance and ensuring that it isn't exploding or trying to kill itself every 2 minutes
that, and electricity bills and bandwidth costs. that can usually be ignored if you host only lightweight services like IRC and email but shit like games can be costly
VPS is usually an alternative option but if they go down you go down too which is gay

>>51231
Architecture actually makes a big diff on RAM usage. OpenBSD on 32bit MacPPC, used like 12 MiB of RAM in TTY, with graphics I got I think around 40MiB of RAM usage.

>>1851
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