RE: Hive API Node for under $750 - Hive can scale at very low cost.
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Hardware isn’t as much of a concern as Internet reliability is far more important. Home Internet is not adequate to provide a reliable witness or full node.
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I totally disagree, unless you are referring to a "standard" home setup.
You can run what you want out of your home. What do you f@cking want from home? What do you want, a T1? lol
I know you get what I mean. You want a fixed IP, you contract it, you know what I mean? You can contract the bandwidth and redundancy you like, as long as you don't live in the middle of nowhere.
Or was that what you were referring to?
A T1 is slow and super expensive compared to standard home Internet. More importantly though is home Internet is not very reliable and any hiccup will cause a node to have to replay for a few days.
I cannot believe you're spouting this crap. Do you even know what a T1 is? Don't you get a joke? And then you come back and treat that like it's something serious to be debated! Obfuscation? Sorry that my joke lent itself to that - I should have known better. (But you could even get the job done with a T1, as long as your not living at the last mile, anyway, but let's forget about satire and try not to get distracted on the irrelevant and impertinent).
So anyhow, how about fibre optics? Have you heard of that where you live? What kind of "hiccups" are you referring to? The town where I come from gives me the same reliability that any data center could have, or are you saying that second line redundancy is actually necessary? Seriously? (My redundancy statement above was also a joke on that level.)
The idea is that you can do what you damned well please from home, all you have to do is contract it. Again, unless you live in the middle of nowhere . . .
My God, I'm appalled at your remarks, your negativism, and total lack of cooperative attitude. Simply stunned! Instead of snide, discouraging remarks, how about something constructive, like, for example, some specific specifications you might recommend? How about sharing the info on what you have? Or are you on a rented, centralized, out-of-your-control shared data server?
A T1 is 1.5Mbps, slow compared to what is available for home use for a fraction of the cost.
I thought you were serious.
Yes, I used to have Fiber, I have 1Gbit now, nearly the best you can get for a home and I wouldn't host a witness or full node on it due to reliability.
What reliability issues? Power outage is the most common, bad weather and we lose power. This typically happens 2-6 times every winter.
ISP issues, this usually happens once and a while, not too often but sometimes. Again, any problem and the node requires 3-4 days to replay and will be down for this entire time.
Seriously?
You got all that from me making a very factual and accurate observation.
I did, not home service. It's pretty simple and easy to understand and well known in the witness community. Home Internet is unreliable Home providers are low priority for carriers and most homes don't have reliable power and back up power. Add in the fact home workstations are not as reliable as server class hardware.
You seem to be really bothered about all this.
Please stop with your distractions - I don't know why you continue to "educate" us about an obsolete T1 after finding out it was a joke, or continue talking about vague ISP "issues" that you don't specify, or power outages! Power outages? Is that the best you can come up with? Can you say UPS? Hellooo? Give me a break! And then a 1Gbit symmetrical connection wouldn't be enough for you!?!?
Let me help you focus. The only thing you talk about are vague, boggeyman negatives. (Are you catching the drift on why your remarks bother me? And what bothers me even more is that you were happy to leave your first comment at that!) So, let's really try to focus:
And so what?
What does it matter to you?
Based on all your hypothetical threats which you make no effort to describe and less effort to recommend prevention methods, the node would have to do a 3-4 day reply (which, BTW, to my understanding, is being drastically reduced as we speak . . .).
And so what?
What's it going to do? Bring the network down? 🤣
UPS don't outlive power outages caused by snow or any weather related outage. UPS will give you 2-5 minutes on a powerful system, maybe 15-20 minutes with no monitor attached and a huge battery.
Actually they are very real realities.
Again, you fail to actually understand. Witnesses are here to protect the blockchain, sure you can use a snapshot in get back up and running in an hour or two, but during a hard fork and an emergency you won't have snapshots and will need to do a full replay and it is critical that core witnesses are back online as fast as possible.
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And so what?
Let's see if I can help. So what if one node goes down for 72 hours?
An API Node? Not a huge problem, although it could be critical to some apps that don't handle the failure well.
A witness node? That will destabilize the Hive network. A top 100 witness is not that big of a deal as they are only producing blocks every hour or so but we barely have 50 reliable witnesses if that. As you go up the ranks, you are depended on to produce blocks more frequently.
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Ah, finally, we get to something specific. Why was it so difficult to reach this point?
And there are solutions for all this too, but since that would mean a couple of trips around the sun, I'll pass.
And, with you just having insulted me in your comment before this one, I've signed off with you anyway.
Best regards,
oh yeah, you were a pleasure to talk to right from the start...
Go buy a mirror.
You fail to address the issue. You continue to obfuscate. Everyone knows what the specs are on a UPS. And no-one would put up a server where you have anything other than 2-5 sec. occasional (like once or twice a year) outages, but you make it sound like it is common place for the vast majority. What's your motivation for doing that? I can only say to obfuscate, to beat around the bush, to avoid addressing the main issue, which, in this case would be justifying your boogeyman issues for not putting up a home based node.
Your example of the completely unrelated hard fork "emergency" is more of the same. What next shall we talk about that has nothing to do with your original, oh so empowering claim?
You would know best mate, I'll leave it to you.
On a secondary note - so as to not confuse ourselves any more than necessary.
Anyone who considers the three words "not home service" to be a constructive example giving specific specifications for recommended minimum connection requirements really needs to have their head checked. Sorry about being so blunt, but it's the truth. At minimum you'd need to ask yourself the hard and fast question of "what are you really doing here?" with that kind of input. What's your intention with that kind of demagogic negativity? And it's not once, but TWICE that you've put forth the same thing with what seems to be a clear intent of trying to "just leave it at that".
Constructive cooperation helps people move forward. All your comments on this thread serve to hold people back.
Most people that have any clue about technology under stands what home service means when referring to Internet connectivity.
Blunt? you kind of had a temper tantrum.
Let me guess, you are the poster child for Constructive cooperation?
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As if I didn't.
As if that was what this conversation is all about (I simply stated a general truth).
Ask yourself how you're doing on constructive cooperation in this thread instead of making a insidious personal attack on me. What do you think? I guess that when you have no rational argument with which to back up outlandish claims, you don't have any other option but to get personal.
Sorry, but I won't go down to that level. I'll stay with the issue and continue to press for answers based on logical reasoning complete with specific recommended specifications - a "no you can't because I said so" doesn't cut it, in my opinion.
You can poke fun at me in an attempt to undermine my arguments, but, be sure, to the wise and understanding, i.e. the vast majority, they see that exactly for what it is.
Good day to you, and I'll be looking forward to talking to you again, another time, in another thread . . . maybe . . . since it's impossible to get useful answers and productive engagement from you, perhaps not. In any event, rest assured, it's nothing personal. Cheers
Marky smart smart smart smart smart.
Rent a server is cheaper anyway. Energy, computer power + connection are cheaper than ever :)
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Also much more centralized and haven't we learned what happens when you host on CENTRALIZED servers!?! Nothing good..
Nodes are generally not run on VPS units but dedicated servers, so they can't be centralized. Data centers can be though.
makes no sense. Sorry.
This is a gross generalisation and based on my experience is simply not true.
I have had absolutely no internet problems with my witness and plenty of other people are running reliable witnesses on home internet, even on 4G mobile.
Of course there are HUGE differences in quality of home internet and some home internet may be too unreliable.
Reading your comments below the main issue you seem to have is power outages (2-6 times every winter). That is terrible power reliability and is not typical.
External power outages where I live are so rare I'd say once in 3 years is typical.
My new backup witness will be a laptop with the ability to change internet connection to 4G, neighbour wifi or even city wifi in the event of a power outage.
Secondly, the new snapshot facility means you do not need to replay a node for every outage. I can generally have my witness up and running within 20 minutes of the machine going down (and I have auto-switching to a backup).
Thirdly, the whole point about decentralisation is that having lots of people run nodes means that individual nodes DO NOT NEED the ultra high uptime that data centers provide. If one API node is down front ends auto switch to others.
For an API node, I agree, for a witness node I disagree. Every time a witness misses a block, it has to be passed on to the next witness and puts the chain at risk.
Glad you agree on API nodes because that is actually what my post was about. :-)
Hive has enough witnesses (although more is always better) but does not have enough API nodes because people think they are very expensive to run.
The specs required to run a witness node are so low these days that you can run a backup witness on a 9 year old laptop (admittedly with 8Gb RAM and 500Gb NVME SSD and i7 4 core - my old Macbook Pro was a beast in its day).
A laptop is the poor man's uninteruptible power supply and 4/5G or alternate wifi (neighbours) can provide internet redundancy.
That's my bad, I know you run your witness on a workstation and assumed it was the same thing.
I disagree, we have far fewer witnesses than we did on Steem and very few who really know anything more than getting the witness up and running, which is just following some instructions and typing in a few commands.
Sure if you don't mind missing blocks, oh and I know the answer is going to be "But I haven't", performance of a top 100 witness is vastly difference than the requirements of a top 20, the higher you get the more demanding it is.
I agree that the level of knowledge about witnessing and running nodes needs to improve and broaden.
This is precisely why I am both calling for far better documentation by Hive devs and encouraging people to run nodes on owned equipment, physically located with them.
If you have a witness running beside you at your desk and you can see the logs running all the time (and immediately when they go down) you are much more connected to being a witness than having it run on some "cloud" server somewhere.
You are more likely to learn how it works. That is certainly what I am trying to do.
According to @someguy123 you can even run a witness on a 4Gb RAM machine.
8Gb RAM with a 4/8 core CPU should be plenty sufficient for a backup witness.
My main witness will have 24Gb & 6 core CPU and my API node 128Gb and 6/12 core CPU & 2x1Tb RAID0 NVME.
Why do you suggest that I would be missing blocks with this setup if I made it to a top20 witness slot? I can always add a second backup witness node to provide further redundancy if necessary. I've got heaps of PC parts lying around. :-)
I disagree, I can see logs from anywhere in the world at similar efficiency. While I am not against having your own equipment what so ever, I do have concerns running critical servers on a home network. Granted not everyone has to deal with snow I won't run even simple services like Poshbot on my home network as I don't trust a home connection being available. This is just my own opinion.
I see no problem with that hardware, but you did mention a 9 year old laptop. The thing is, running a witness is a lot different than replaying one. While we do have the ability to do snapshots now, it can still take hours to transfer block logs and snapshots even with 1 Gbit Internet connection. The real problem comes during hard forks and emergency patches, you won't have a snapshot to rely on, and will need to do a full sync, witness nodes and API nodes.
Most witnesses are no where to be seen when critical shit happens, the witnesses that are and have the hardware, Internet, and knowledge to support agile recovery are who I want protecting the Hive blockchain. Unfortunately, this list is rather tiny and doesn't reflect in the witness rankings.
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Of course you can see logs from anywhere in the world, just as you can do Zoom calls with anyone in the world but my point was not about efficiency.
My point was about physicality, commitment, and the "in-your-face" rather than "out of sight and out of mind" aspect.
You are right that a lot of witnesses just set and forget and some don't even notice they are missing blocks for days or weeks.
It is precisely because they are using far away rented servers that they have less commitment and interest in learning witness skills than if the witness node was living with them.
I keep my own backups of block_log and do my own snapshots which I can transfer to whichever Hive node needs them over my Gigabit Ethernet LAN. Even the 330Gb block_log only takes less than one hour to transfer.
While I agree that the ability to replay is also important for hard-forks and emergency patches, replay speed is NOT about internet connection or where a node is located.
Its about single core CPU performance, RAM and I/O speed.
The fact is that the machine I specced above will beat 90% of servers in those factors.
In particular, server CPUs generally have a large number of cores but relatively poor single thread performance. High end desktop and gaming PCs by contrast generally have fewer cores but much better single thread CPU performance.
Regarding knowledge: if you want more people to have it then more effort needs to be made to spread it.
While I have got great assistance from people like @someguy123, @deathwing and @rishi556 the availability and accessibility of documentation on running Hive nodes is quite poor and out of date.
This is something that really needs to be remedied. There needs to be an Idiots Guide accessible on all major front-ends and hive.io.
I disagree, I don't think that has anything to do with it. Granted if someone buys hardware they likely care more about Hive than renting, but correlation is not causation.
I will agree this is far easier on your own LAN.
Yes, but that wasn't my point. My point is you cannot rely on snapshots, especially when a witness is needed most (during hard forks and chain down events).
Regardless, I have no problems with running an API node on a home network if you have the resources to do it, a witness node I am not so agreeable about. I merely was saying the Internet is more of the critical factor especially as the chain gets larger and providers make their data caps smaller.
Wow, I'm not going to take the time to count them, but what would you say, 20 comments or so to get to this point?
I'm so impressed that I'll ask you for the same information once again: can you share what you think those necessary resources are?
Edit: please forgive me if you've already laid them out - I got tired of getting lost in your maze and stopped reading but did want to see how you ended things. Even if you have, maybe you might consolidate your thoughts and dedicate a of post of your own on the subject? Remember, focused, with a title something like: Running an API Node from Home. ;-)
Good job on all this, but I think it's very clear that there is heavy resistance to the idea (you can bet that more than one have been following this thread closely, and they've probably got Discord burning hot!), and that this is going to be a long haul marathon. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if you, and a few others too, might just end up being who does the documentation. Lots of work, but it'll be worth the effort. Count on me to help in any way that you think may be useful and possible. Maybe you might want to start a "Documentation Community". It's an idea that came up the other day on one of @taskmaster4450's threads. It might seem a bit like overkill, but it's really the only way to have admin control to be able to manage, update, and, ultimately control the content, and it seems to me that with the importance documentation carries with it, administrative control is absolutely necessary. Food for thought, and thanks for taking the lead. This is really good stuff. I, for one (and I'm also absolutely sure - on this one too - that I'm not alone on this), am lapping up every bit of your contributions on the subject! 😋
I admire your persistence and patience (I can't even bear to continue reading more of that "wet blanket power" - don't have the patience or the time). You're definitely doing the right thing and thank you so much for your efforts. My "reality check" response fell on deaf ears, but was nonetheless very revealing and worth taking note of. In my opinion, what you are proposing is a key step forward that we must take, it's in our own best interests, and we must press forward in spite of whatever resistance that may arise, no matter how great (or small) it may be. A big thumb's up!
I don't think he means to be a wet blanket, he just comes from the perspective of a professional IT guy.
As a profession they have become far too used to using "cloud" services.
Its easier, more comfortable, easier to scale (for centralised solutions) and no one got fired for using AWS or other "cloud" based solutions.
But what is sacrificed is control, independence and higher costs than buying and running you own equipment.
There are also substantial dis-economies of scale with massive data farms - George Gilder has written about this in "Life After Google".
Also there is a loss of hardware technical skills, although @themarkymark is impressive this regard.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost for those that want independence and free speech.
It isn't about cloud as much as Home data center vs real data center reliability.
And there you go again. It has nothing to do with "reliability". If anything clear has come out of this "conversation", it's precisely that. Or haven't your realized that you agreed that for an API Node . . .
How tiring . . .
It has everything to do with the IT professional in charge (and, of course, and this is without question, that means, by definition, having PHYSICAL ACCESS), and his or her systems and connectivity solutions contracted and implemented.
But nooooooooooooooooooo.
I've never been so infuriated!
Next you'll be telling us that Bitcoin wallets are better stored on data center shared servers (head's up: that's a joke that's meant to be an exaggerated extreme to try to make evident the obvious in a funny way, which means that a pedantic response on that is not necessary - save your breath).
You sound like you have lots of friends.
And that's all you have to say.
Says a lot, don't you think?
(And I mean that seriously: all your arguments summed up in one nice little phrase. Or do you think serious issues are for brown-nosing only? Are you serious? This is about making friends?)
Nah just got tired of your dribble.
Hahaha. You don't even get it.
Anybody and everybody can clearly see that your previous comment was nothing more than yet another personal attack.
In spite of all your efforts to the contrary, you've actually done a wonderful job expressing yourself with absolute clarity.
I've said all the "dribble" I have to say on the subject, and it's here to stay, for all to see, forever, on this immutable blockchain, and, given such, 'I rest my case'.
I used to work in IT, and I would say that anyone relying on cloud services for sensitive data is not a professional (even though all the "kids" do it - hey, we live in a world where a 100k hack is solved by "printing" more tokens - not serious at all). This is my opinion, no doubt about it, but with the cybersecurity issues we ALL know about, I never ever had a client's sensitive data in the "cloud". NEVER! Not even backups. That's all done ON SITE, and multiple locations if the data is extremely sensitive.
To be honest, everything I've heard here on his part sounds extremely "amateur". Sorry, but that's my take on what I've seen him say (and how he's said it, etc., etc.).
Troll Alert: Warning, the following is strictly trolling now:
No! Your bad was your totally flippant and outright dismissing of the entire post!
Remember?
And then you continue by ending your comment with yet more negativity totally absent of possible solutions . . .
How apropos!
/end trolling
You are not even a good troll at that.
Thank you for the compliment . . . even though I'm sure that wasn't your intention. 🤣
And that's what I think is THE point this person wants to avoid, or doesn't realize exists, and I'm not sure which is worse (even though lower he does talk about it with you).
Look at what it took me just to get him to talk about the number of witnesses! Amazing! I'm flabbergasted. And he is a top 3 witness.
(Well, maybe all that is not so surprising . . . depending on how suspecting of a mind one may have.)
Glad to see you got him focused. He finished with my by insulting me.