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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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.
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 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.
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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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.
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?
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.