I am very happy to announce that I have started a witness which is now live. I was thinking about doing this for years but I didn't want to use any hosting company because they can give us the illusion of having nodes around the world but then those can be quickly taken down (or worse, taken over) in one go. Then some time ago @gtg published this post to which @themarkymark made this follow-up. Thank you guys for the inspiration. This is exactly what I was looking for - some small hardware that will do the job yet has super low power consumption. You know, blockchain tech doesn't need to use up all this vast energy.
The Hardware
Beelink Mini PC S12 that comes with:
Intel Alder Lake-N100
16GB DDR4 RAM
500GB NVMe
I picked it up brand new from ebay for $189.
500GB storage is not enough for a hived node so I also got a second-hand 1TB NVMe from someone locally for $60.
Here it is:
The Software
Windows. Haha, just kidding. The Beelink came with it preinstalled though, but luckily all traces of it were gone when I replaced the disk with the 1TB NVMe one.
So now we have:
Ubuntu 22.04
hived 1.27.6 synced from scratch. Yes, I opted to sync from scratch on this machine. It takes some time but it's not the end of the world.
Now that syncing is done, this is using about 10-15% of the CPU.
Power & Internet backup
Hosting at home has its challenges, the two main ones seem to be the possibility of power and internet connectivity outages. Either of those would reduce the reliability of the node. For the first one, I looked at a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) device but there are some small but consistent reports that they catch fire, and I don't want to take any chances with that. I keep looking for alternatives. Where my device is there are very rare power outages (once every few years) so hopefully that will remain the case, but having a backup will be even better.
For internet connectivity, I've recently been using a 4G router and am very happy with it. You plug in a SIM card that has an internet plan and it connects to the 4G network - then you can connect the router to your device via a cable. This allows for some pretty nice redundancy - you can have your regular internet cable coming into your router, and also your SIM card, so you can have fiber optic + 4G. It seems extremely rare that both will be down. In practice though, it may or may not be an overkill (depending on your situation), since I have barely ever seen the 4G network here to be down.
Values as a witness
It kind of feels like there is a place for such a section. My core interest is in decentralization and running my own witness with my own hardware is hopefully a small contribution to that. If anyone else is inspired to do this, you are welcome to contact me for any help.
I want to see this place thrive while at the same time keeping the core principles of being accessible to people - both in terms of cost of transactions and in terms of ease of use. I want others to be able to benefit from the myriad of wonderful things that I benefit from by participating in the Hive network.
Cool efficient setup. Good luck on your witness.
Thanks :)
I had an UPS a long time ago. I didn't have any issues with it until it died of "old age". But that doesn't mean those reports aren't real.
May I ask what country are you from? I like when our witnesses are spread wide geographically, and you might get a vote just for that... Although there are other reasons why I would vote for your witness. 😉
Cool, thanks. I'm from Bulgaria.
I don't think there is another witness in Bulgaria, so, as I mentioned, for that and other reasons, you have my vote.
Wish you luck on your witness buddy
Thanks.
Good luck with your witness.
Thank you.
congrats on starting a new witness server.
Thanks.
With a device that small you could probably get away with a rather small UPS in terms of VA. I run a 2000VA powercool UPS myself (at current usage it lasts almost 45 mins on battery power), I personally think they only tend to catch fire if you neglect cleaning the vents and battery maintenance, (i.e drain battery's by 70% and recharge every few months or so, depending on brands instructions)
Connectivity wise though, multiple lines is the best option, including 4G wifi like you have. Landline with a 4G/5G backup could work well, unlikely for both to fail unless it's a city wide outage. (I have one of those a few months back)
This means we have... 2-4 witnesses running nodes from home as far as I'm aware. :D
Welcome to the club!
I'm a hive witness supporting the blockchain please consider voting for me.
Thanks for the UPS tips.
Only 2-4 running from home? I hope it's more. I also know a few, hope it's not the same ones that you know, haha.
I have a ton of UPSs and never had any "fire-related" issues. But on the other hand I've also had a lot of UPS that fail, so sometimes it is the UPS itself that causes a problem, even when there is no outage. Also, they tend to run out of energy in the face of an extended outage, so you often need a generator backup that you can switch to. So if power is normally stable where you're at, a UPS probably won't help much anyways.
Oh, one other idea is to use a laptop. They have "built-in" UPSs and those are very reliable.
Yeah, I was thinking about that as well. Too bad Mini PCs don't come with some small battery like laptops. So if an external laptop could be made to power the Mini PC, it could work. Even some broken laptop that can just be used for charging.
I imagine this takes 12 volts or something like that. So you could diy a 12v UPS with some li-ion batteries. I have seen some ups kits.
You are absolutely right.👍
In addition to running the HIVE witness node on the VPS, I also run a local node on a Linux host at home. In order to avoid sudden power outages at home, I configured a UPS for the host at home. At the beginning, the host at home was very stable. But after three or two years, the host had power outages from time to time, which often caused my local node to crash. After careful investigation and analysis, I found that the culprit was the UPS. After I unplugged the UPS, the local node has been running stably.😅
Oh, good to learn from your experience, thanks for sharing. Some others mentioned similar reports that the UPS itself was causing power failures.