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Non-Profit usage for idling servers
I love to manage servers, but I also don't quite like to spend money on just idling them. I wish to feel like I use my idling servers for something good.
What non-profit projects do you know for using idling servers in donating their resources?
So far I know about:
- Tor Relay - this is for donating bandwidth to Tor online anonymity - there is a guide made by @raindog308 on LowEndBox;
- FoldingAtHome - this one uses CPU to contribute computational power in help fighting global health threats;
Comments
syncthing
https://boinc.berkeley.edu - this has got a few science related projects you can run on idlers.
GlobalPing
I run I2P relays/routers; lightweight too.
https://tracker.archiveteam.org/
im a bit unsure if they allow server ips because they talk about "clean" connections on their wiki https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior#Can_I_use_whatever_internet_access_for_the_Warrior?
they're currently working on archiving as many goo.gl links as they can: https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/
Providers may not be happy if their IPs get banned, no?
How much traffic do you see on I2P relays? Originally, I was thinking of running Tor guard nodes, but the entire Tor network seemed very underutilized in general.
Syncthing public relay https://relays.syncthing.net/ (actually you can see some LET username inside the list)
Globalping https://globalping.io/ and RIPE Atlas https://atlas.ripe.net/ for network monitor and probes
@tsusu
Essentially you can configure it to use as much as you wish.
In my config:
adduser zed
Public NTP server
Yeah that's a nice usecase if you want serve a lot of users and actually use the allocated bandwidth. Europe and USA is covered pretty well, the rest of the world needs your help. Just install chrony, edit the config (preferrably handpick some good upstream time sources), add your server to https://www.ntppool.org and off you go.
I run dozens of NTP servers: https://www.ntppool.org/a/jnd (caution, loads a lot graphs!)
Cool! How much bandwidth does it use per month and what's your average rate of queries per second? 😎
I will probably host a container registry mirror on my racknerd vps soon, but i only have around 20 GB storage available. Would that be enough?
I will probably also host a public ntp server!
Let's hope my 1 GB ram and 20 GB available storage will be able to handle both.
I don't have such detailed stats, it varies heavily across the regions. You can configure you virtual network speed (actually how often you get rotated in the DNS pool) of each country zone to regulate the traffic according to your monthly limit. In Asia you can saturate 20TB/per month and you'll start to be limited by CPU processing rather than network. Chrony is by default run only by single thread but with some manual config you can set up more processes (so that each daemon get distributed the incoming traffic evenly).
In USA at full speed you approach 4-5 TB per month, in Europe it can be less than 1 TB in well covered countries.
For example now on my Japan node there's steady 13 Mbit/s incoming traffic which divided by 90 byte NTP packet gives you around 18k queries per second. If you count that one client queries the server on average every 5 minutes then my VPS is serving couple million end devices.
The beauty of NTP server is that it can run on very basic hardware, 512 MB ram is more than enough, basic Debian install takes 3 GB, chrony itself is peanuts. It can saturate old and lowly CPUs if you let it handle more traffic, Epycs and Ryzens don't sweat much.
Just wondering if how useful you find this for your own purposes, and whether these ntp servers peer with your own ntp servers in other regions, or just random NTP servers that are geographically close.
I don't necessarily care about exact "real world time", but I want my servers to be in sync with each other as they're sharing auth tokens around and I'd seen cases where some servers rejected tokens created by other servers as they were in the future. So, I have a weird private NTP infrastructure running over wireguard between my servers and only one of them syncs with an external NTP server. Each of the VMs on each server then syncs with its host for NTP. It works for me, but I can't help but shake the feeling that "it's the wrong way to do it" (TM)...
I don't think it's necessary to have private peering across the globe. You can certainly add your other servers as redundant sources next to reliable NTP servers or just the NTP pool, modern software like chrony doesn't have problem with many sources and it always picks the best ones (most stable clock, low network delay, low jitter). Only issue would be that with 20 sources it loads the 20 servers when it's not needed but that's problem for the underserved zones like Asia.
For my NTP servers I search and hand pick the best stratum one sources (not necessary for regular end user) like country measurement bureau, universities and some of the big guys (that don't apply leap second smearing like Google). They use GPS or atomic clocks as direct reference, this way it's distributed and reliable. I found that Apple servers are good source that chrony prefers. At the end I configure couple sources from the pool itself as fallback.
If the server has good network connectivity (not single homed Cogent, ehm) then you can easily achieve sub millisecond accuracy on some end device within the country. In general modern networking and software algorithms like chrony uses allow you to synchronize accurate time (as you say for your regular use) even from different continents. Usually it's not that important that you have upstream source within couple millisecond away from you. This applies in the US as it's a geographically big zone and the NTP pool can serve you sources from opposite coast but you still have good time.
maybe donate these idle servers to https://microlxc.net, it would not be idle anymore. @Neoon
I've just setup an NTP server on my racknerd vps. Waiting for my score on ntppool to go up.
How long does that usually take?
just leave it & check it in the next few month(s)
Did you read this part?
https://ntppool.org/en/join.html:
How do you deal with amplification abuse?
My vps expires somewhere in 2027 and I am planning to renew it. And yes, i did read it. It did not state when my vps would actually be available for others to use once i added it to the dashboard.
It's not long, about 5 hours.
Hopes and prayers
That was case some 10+ years ago with old ntpd version, isn't it? Chrony and other modern versions don't have such vulnerability.
NTP server is better suited for yearly plan but some month contributed is welcome too. The issue is rather leaving underserved zone at the end which pushes more load to other servers. Clients will fetch new IP address from the pool and should continue just fine. In practice once you delist your server the vast majority of traffic dies quickly in matter of hours. This also applies to regular servers that have network outages, IP changes, maintenance, desynchronize from their own source or another problem. Their score goes down, the pool will stop announcing them and any modern client needs to handle such situation anyway. If you have a device where you hardcode some IP for time sync then it's your own problem
Of course the gentelman way to stop contributing is to mark your server for deletion some time in advance, like a week.
Disable monlist and forget about it
I am looking at Syncthing but there is no option to set a specific monthly bandwidth. One would have to calculate a limit by "global-rate" option I guess?