7 ms·

When I was a young teenager in the 90s, the thing that blew my mind when I got my first computer was that it turned out that _all computers were servers_. The c

When I was a young teenager in the 90s, the thing that blew my mind when I got my first computer was that it turned out that _all computers were servers_. The computer didn't need to be in a rack form factor, or expensive, or any of that. It just needed Winsock, TCP/IP, and that was it! My computer was the same as any other computer on the Internet. So, while this post is cool, I wish there was less emphasis on the hardware, which is pretty irrelevant for running a Node-base app and serving it to the Internet. You also don't need a static IP—you just need to figure out dynamic DNS :).

giantrobot 3y ago
When I was a teenager one of the coolest technology things I got was an old spare desktop. I installed FreeBSD at first and later Linux but it was amazing to have my own Unix machine at home. It was not powerful nor did it have tons of memory or storage. But it was mine to do with as I pleased. I ran IRC bots and a web server hosting shitty Perl scripts I wrote. It was also the router (via dial-up) for the house once I got a network card for it. I learned so much messing around on that machine. I credit my ability to exit vim to working on that machine.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  One of the defining moments of my life was installing FreeBSD and figuring out how to get X11 working. Everyday after school I would try something new and one day I finally got it working. Loading an X window with xterm was so amazing. I get the same kind of joy today when I build my own Linux distros. First boot always brings a smile to my face :)
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    Back in the day when a bad config might burn out your monitor. Fun times. But it was similar for me. XFree86 3.x was a dumpster fire with having to guess (of scan through dmsg logs) which of several individual servers was right for your card, since the system might recognize only the graphics chip but rarely the marketing name of the card you owned. If you were lucky you'd be able to escape a bad config. Messing with X11 is what taught me to use a serial console since I could connect from another machine (before I had a network) to kill the errant X server. I bought so many damn O'Reilly books trying to master my little home Unix machine. I learned so much and appreciate having that knowledge but I do not miss the process of learning it at all. No StackOverflow, just assholes on IRC dismissively saying "RTFM" despite the manual being terrible or non-existent. That was unless of course you were being berated for calling it X Windows because assholes have to asshole.
incanus77 3y ago
When I released my first piece of open source software in 1999, I hosted it on my desktop Linux machine out of my apartment on a cable modem connection over dynamic DNS. I popped it up on Freshmeat[1] and then watched the Apache logs scroll by while eating dinner on the couch. One of the coolest feelings in my career. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode
netsharc 3y ago
Damn, now you've made me want to dig up the story of Germany's first online rail journey planner as written by its creator: it was in the 90's, before Deutsche Bahn had an online presence, but they had the journey information on CD-ROM. The guy took the data from the CD-ROM and created a tool that would return journeys between 2 stations if you queried it. And how does the query work? You'd e-mail his uni address, his "server" (in reality a PC in the corner of his room) would fetch emails every 5 minutes, process the queries and e-mailed back the results. Sadly Google and DDG are useless now, the last time I wanted to find this story it took a lotttt of time.
- codewithcheese 3y ago
  Pasted your comment in ChatGPT Plus, it did a search and found the link https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/history.html.en https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/history.... I think it got relatively lucky with the query, since tried a few variations, you.com and Perplexity and they all failed to find it.
  - habi 3y ago
    Frederik Ramm went on to found Geofabrik: http://www.geofabrik.de/geofabrik/geofabrik.html http://www.geofabrik.de/geofabrik/geofabrik.html
doubleg72 3y ago
Funny, I had this same epiphany!
EvanAnderson 3y ago
My version of this epiphany was w/ BBSs in the late 80s. I just assumed the BBSs I called were running on "mainframes" or some such. It was shocking when I found out I could run a BBS on my PC.
- leptons 3y ago
  Ran a Commodore 64 BBS with multiple modems/phone lines, and many floppy disk drives for storage. It wasn't fast, but it was a lot of fun.
DeathArrow 3y ago
<_all computers were servers_ All devices with CPUs can be servers. Your phone, your car...
- techie128 3y ago
  Modern hard drives / ssds have quite powerful ARM cores. They could, in theory, be used as a server :)
userbinator 3y ago
Put another way, at the height of P2P filesharing, most 16-year-olds did indeed have a server in their room.
the_gipsy 3y ago
Today, everyone has one computer, always connected to the network. So sad that we do nothing with it.
- jraph 3y ago
  I suspect we are relying on "doing nothing with it" for these computers to be usable the way we want them to. More in the following paragraphs. > always connected to the network If you speak about smartphones, they are usable because they mostly sleep most of the time and thus can last enough without being plugged to be useful. They are always connected to the network, but also in a very specific way: they are mostly waiting for a specific wake up notification from the network, while most of their hardware is actually sleeping. Being actually always fully on might also hurt their battery. Their connection is also often unreliable. As you move, their will be disconnections. That's good enough to casually browse the web. It's fine if some page does not load, or loads slowly, occasionally. But I suspect it's not good enough for serving a website: making this randomly fail might be less than ideal. Many people also light putting their phones in airplane mode, or turning them off during the night. Now, maybe we could still figure out something useful from this "always" "connected" network, with some sort of paradigm change, maybe with more asynchronicity.
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  Given the average person's approach to InfoSec (what's wrong with "password" as a password????) this is probably no bad thing
- k__ 3y ago
  What do you mean with "nothing"?
peteforde 3y ago
My version of this was the realization that Windows NT Server was not any more suited to being a server, at least not due to any inherent magic. NT Server was something MSFT could market to enterprise customers for big dollars. It did have meaningful tools for Active Directory and administering a Domain... but if you're a person and not an IT department, it's a safe bet that you'd end up using exactly zero of those tools. TL;DR: they could have named it Expensive Corporate Seat Licencing Edition.
- teh_klev 3y ago
  Minor nitpick...Active Directory didn't appear until Windows Server 2000.
  - peteforde 3y ago
    Busted! My life is a lie. :)
- zh3 3y ago
  There was some differences in the registry settings IIRC, the server version simply came with fewer restrictions on the IP stack (i.e. with a bit of regedit hacking, standard NT worked just as well as NT server). There might have been things like needing the server version to run SQL Server as well.
  - peteforde 3y ago
    That actually sounds familiar (the SQL server part). I feel like perhaps they went through awkward contortions of releasing kid glove versions of MSSQL for a while, too. At least before eventually realizing that mySQL was at least as much an existential threat as Oracle was.
gchamonlive 3y ago
Even without the problem of cgnat, as someone pointed out, some ISPs outright block outgoing http traffic from ports 80 and 443, so it really is quite inconvenient for homelabs these days.
xnx 3y ago
This is even more true now that SSDs have give any old laptop levels of IOPS that would've only been possible with a RAID 5 array of 10,000 RPM SCSI drives 20 years ago.
foresto 3y ago
I prefer non-server-class machines for purposes like this. Modern single-board computers make very capable home servers, and are far smaller, quieter, cheaper, and less power-hungry.
- fwmcbumcrumble 3y ago
  Servers piss away power at idle because they're not designed for low idle power consumption. I personally just a regular PC desktop because I need the expansion slots. But SFF PCs are amazing home servers, and have more than enough power for what you actually need. Also don't forget laptops. They're designed from the group up to be efficient AND have a built in UPS. My home server for the longest time was an old laptop with 32 gigs of ram (back when that was a huge amount).
  - HenryBemis 3y ago
    I keep a Dell laptop as a server. I used to run stuff on my desktop, but an electricity outage screwed me one time I was away for 2 weeks and the fist night the building admin decided to do some works after midnight (I know because I stopped getting alerts on my phone). That 2 week downtime cost me money (thanks guys!). So I bought a 2018 Dell laptop with a messed-up screen. Now when there is downtime, the laptop stays on, connectivity goes away for a few mins (which doesn't bother me) and everything is resolved fast. So, I suggest either your desktop+UPS, or a 5yo laptop (just make sure it's 'high-end' - for its age). I then upgrade RAMs & SSD/M2 from Crucial (I like the convenience of their app) so I end up making decent "server laptops" for under €300.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Laptops rely on batteries so... no. Thats a fire hazard to have them connected 24/7
  - dingi 3y ago
    Laptops make great home servers. I have a Thinkpad (broken display) with i7 8th gen, 16gig ram running quite a few workloads for me 24/7. Due to exorbitan cloud costs, I use it as a sort of staging area for apps from my side projects. Tunnel it to a $4 digital ocean vps and voila you have a serious cloud instance at a fraction of the cost.
navigate8310 3y ago
Now, dynamic DNS is not something to worry about but CGNAT
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > Now, dynamic DNS is not something to worry about but CGNAT Thankfully, there are some pretty cheap VPS options out there. I actually have my homelab behind some, with the nodes running WireGuard to bypass CGNAT. There's also a few proxy services mentioned in other comments that basically do the same. Of course, you can also just run things "in the cloud" because the non-enterprise VPS providers come at many different price points, but at the same time it's also just really nice to put your own devices to a good use and have the data be on your own drives (hopefully with adequate backups)
- timcobb 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of that. That would be transparent for me as a subscriber, though? I imagine the packets are routed to my cable modem based on some other identified like a MAC?
  - mcfedr 3y ago
    CGNAT means you don't have an internet routable IP, so you have no way of hosting something anyone can access without some external proxy, such as cloudflare or tailscale
    - timcobb 3y ago
      Oh so it’s just like home NAT, and they won’t let me port for ward
      - foresto 3y ago
        It's more complicated than that. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#concerning-cgnats https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#concernin...

giantrobot 3y ago

When I was a teenager one of the coolest technology things I got was an old spare desktop. I installed FreeBSD at first and later Linux but it was amazing to have my own Unix machine at home. It was not powerful nor did it have tons of memory or storage. But it was mine to do with as I pleased. I ran IRC bots and a web server hosting shitty Perl scripts I wrote. It was also the router (via dial-up) for the house once I got a network card for it. I learned so much messing around on that machine. I credit my ability to exit vim to working on that machine.

grepfru_it 3y ago
One of the defining moments of my life was installing FreeBSD and figuring out how to get X11 working. Everyday after school I would try something new and one day I finally got it working. Loading an X window with xterm was so amazing. I get the same kind of joy today when I build my own Linux distros. First boot always brings a smile to my face :)
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Back in the day when a bad config might burn out your monitor. Fun times. But it was similar for me. XFree86 3.x was a dumpster fire with having to guess (of scan through dmsg logs) which of several individual servers was right for your card, since the system might recognize only the graphics chip but rarely the marketing name of the card you owned. If you were lucky you'd be able to escape a bad config. Messing with X11 is what taught me to use a serial console since I could connect from another machine (before I had a network) to kill the errant X server. I bought so many damn O'Reilly books trying to master my little home Unix machine. I learned so much and appreciate having that knowledge but I do not miss the process of learning it at all. No StackOverflow, just assholes on IRC dismissively saying "RTFM" despite the manual being terrible or non-existent. That was unless of course you were being berated for calling it X Windows because assholes have to asshole.

incanus77 3y ago

When I released my first piece of open source software in 1999, I hosted it on my desktop Linux machine out of my apartment on a cable modem connection over dynamic DNS. I popped it up on Freshmeat[1] and then watched the Apache logs scroll by while eating dinner on the couch. One of the coolest feelings in my career. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode

netsharc 3y ago

Damn, now you've made me want to dig up the story of Germany's first online rail journey planner as written by its creator: it was in the 90's, before Deutsche Bahn had an online presence, but they had the journey information on CD-ROM. The guy took the data from the CD-ROM and created a tool that would return journeys between 2 stations if you queried it. And how does the query work? You'd e-mail his uni address, his "server" (in reality a PC in the corner of his room) would fetch emails every 5 minutes, process the queries and e-mailed back the results. Sadly Google and DDG are useless now, the last time I wanted to find this story it took a lotttt of time.

codewithcheese 3y ago
Pasted your comment in ChatGPT Plus, it did a search and found the link https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/history.html.en https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/history.... I think it got relatively lucky with the query, since tried a few variations, you.com and Perplexity and they all failed to find it.
- habi 3y ago
  Frederik Ramm went on to found Geofabrik: http://www.geofabrik.de/geofabrik/geofabrik.html http://www.geofabrik.de/geofabrik/geofabrik.html

doubleg72 3y ago

Funny, I had this same epiphany!

EvanAnderson 3y ago

My version of this epiphany was w/ BBSs in the late 80s. I just assumed the BBSs I called were running on "mainframes" or some such. It was shocking when I found out I could run a BBS on my PC.

leptons 3y ago
Ran a Commodore 64 BBS with multiple modems/phone lines, and many floppy disk drives for storage. It wasn't fast, but it was a lot of fun.

DeathArrow 3y ago

<_all computers were servers_ All devices with CPUs can be servers. Your phone, your car...

techie128 3y ago
Modern hard drives / ssds have quite powerful ARM cores. They could, in theory, be used as a server :)

userbinator 3y ago

Put another way, at the height of P2P filesharing, most 16-year-olds did indeed have a server in their room.

the_gipsy 3y ago

Today, everyone has one computer, always connected to the network. So sad that we do nothing with it.

jraph 3y ago
I suspect we are relying on "doing nothing with it" for these computers to be usable the way we want them to. More in the following paragraphs. > always connected to the network If you speak about smartphones, they are usable because they mostly sleep most of the time and thus can last enough without being plugged to be useful. They are always connected to the network, but also in a very specific way: they are mostly waiting for a specific wake up notification from the network, while most of their hardware is actually sleeping. Being actually always fully on might also hurt their battery. Their connection is also often unreliable. As you move, their will be disconnections. That's good enough to casually browse the web. It's fine if some page does not load, or loads slowly, occasionally. But I suspect it's not good enough for serving a website: making this randomly fail might be less than ideal. Many people also light putting their phones in airplane mode, or turning them off during the night. Now, maybe we could still figure out something useful from this "always" "connected" network, with some sort of paradigm change, maybe with more asynchronicity.
darreninthenet 3y ago
Given the average person's approach to InfoSec (what's wrong with "password" as a password????) this is probably no bad thing
k__ 3y ago
What do you mean with "nothing"?

peteforde 3y ago

My version of this was the realization that Windows NT Server was not any more suited to being a server, at least not due to any inherent magic. NT Server was something MSFT could market to enterprise customers for big dollars. It did have meaningful tools for Active Directory and administering a Domain... but if you're a person and not an IT department, it's a safe bet that you'd end up using exactly zero of those tools. TL;DR: they could have named it Expensive Corporate Seat Licencing Edition.

teh_klev 3y ago
Minor nitpick...Active Directory didn't appear until Windows Server 2000.
- peteforde 3y ago
  Busted! My life is a lie. :)
zh3 3y ago
There was some differences in the registry settings IIRC, the server version simply came with fewer restrictions on the IP stack (i.e. with a bit of regedit hacking, standard NT worked just as well as NT server). There might have been things like needing the server version to run SQL Server as well.
- peteforde 3y ago
  That actually sounds familiar (the SQL server part). I feel like perhaps they went through awkward contortions of releasing kid glove versions of MSSQL for a while, too. At least before eventually realizing that mySQL was at least as much an existential threat as Oracle was.

gchamonlive 3y ago

Even without the problem of cgnat, as someone pointed out, some ISPs outright block outgoing http traffic from ports 80 and 443, so it really is quite inconvenient for homelabs these days.

xnx 3y ago

This is even more true now that SSDs have give any old laptop levels of IOPS that would've only been possible with a RAID 5 array of 10,000 RPM SCSI drives 20 years ago.

foresto 3y ago

I prefer non-server-class machines for purposes like this. Modern single-board computers make very capable home servers, and are far smaller, quieter, cheaper, and less power-hungry.

fwmcbumcrumble 3y ago
Servers piss away power at idle because they're not designed for low idle power consumption. I personally just a regular PC desktop because I need the expansion slots. But SFF PCs are amazing home servers, and have more than enough power for what you actually need. Also don't forget laptops. They're designed from the group up to be efficient AND have a built in UPS. My home server for the longest time was an old laptop with 32 gigs of ram (back when that was a huge amount).
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  I keep a Dell laptop as a server. I used to run stuff on my desktop, but an electricity outage screwed me one time I was away for 2 weeks and the fist night the building admin decided to do some works after midnight (I know because I stopped getting alerts on my phone). That 2 week downtime cost me money (thanks guys!). So I bought a 2018 Dell laptop with a messed-up screen. Now when there is downtime, the laptop stays on, connectivity goes away for a few mins (which doesn't bother me) and everything is resolved fast. So, I suggest either your desktop+UPS, or a 5yo laptop (just make sure it's 'high-end' - for its age). I then upgrade RAMs & SSD/M2 from Crucial (I like the convenience of their app) so I end up making decent "server laptops" for under €300.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Laptops rely on batteries so... no. Thats a fire hazard to have them connected 24/7
- dingi 3y ago
  Laptops make great home servers. I have a Thinkpad (broken display) with i7 8th gen, 16gig ram running quite a few workloads for me 24/7. Due to exorbitan cloud costs, I use it as a sort of staging area for apps from my side projects. Tunnel it to a $4 digital ocean vps and voila you have a serious cloud instance at a fraction of the cost.

navigate8310 3y ago

Now, dynamic DNS is not something to worry about but CGNAT

KronisLV 3y ago
> Now, dynamic DNS is not something to worry about but CGNAT Thankfully, there are some pretty cheap VPS options out there. I actually have my homelab behind some, with the nodes running WireGuard to bypass CGNAT. There's also a few proxy services mentioned in other comments that basically do the same. Of course, you can also just run things "in the cloud" because the non-enterprise VPS providers come at many different price points, but at the same time it's also just really nice to put your own devices to a good use and have the data be on your own drives (hopefully with adequate backups)
timcobb 3y ago
Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of that. That would be transparent for me as a subscriber, though? I imagine the packets are routed to my cable modem based on some other identified like a MAC?
- mcfedr 3y ago
  CGNAT means you don't have an internet routable IP, so you have no way of hosting something anyone can access without some external proxy, such as cloudflare or tailscale
  - timcobb 3y ago
    Oh so it’s just like home NAT, and they won’t let me port for ward
    - foresto 3y ago
      It's more complicated than that. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#concerning-cgnats https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#concernin...