I’m in an apartment currently; the footprint I’m willing to allocate to a server amounts to a full-size ATX case, and a bunch of small ebay’d lenovo thin clients (plus a handful of rPi’s and similar SBCs). When I finally am able to get a house with some actual project space, I aspire to build something approaching your setup over time.
I started on cluster (8) of rpi3b and a Synology NAS 10 years ago… prior to that was just storing it all on random hdd (harddrive toaster was alway present and loaded on my desk) and on my computer. these days you can get those little intel n100 or n150 boxes for pretty cheap too. There’s a lot of options, and a lot of mature software tech to make it all work well together.
It’s been enough to just seed behind a VPN at this scale? I’d like to do something similar one day at smaller scale but I’m a bit fearful.
In my youth I used to operate my own and admin on other ROM sites. The smart move then was Asian server hosts who would take anonymous payments with no personal info attached to the accounts. But we were still worried of Nintendo, keeping safe was a bit scary.
But they never went after us. It was easier for them to just go after people hosting in the USA under their real names.
But that’s centralized, different ballpark from p2p. I used to use mullvad for torrents until they removed port forwarding.
It’s been enough to just seed behind a VPN at this scale?
I think that question really hinges on “what vpn provider you choose to use”. Honestly… People don’t hit me as hard as I wish they would.
~72 TB uploaded the past 30 days.
From earlier. ~64TB of that is on my VPN’d hosts. I know it’s a bottleneck by it’s very nature… the highest I’ve seen all 4 peak at the same time was just over 3gbps aggregate…
The VPN I use is a no log vpn… and I choose an exit point that’s outside of my country. So at the very least would require coordination between 2 countries, and a provider that has nothing to give up…
At that point it’s all about the trackers that you’re a part of.
