Now that we’re solidly in beta and probably about to get a mad influx of new people and their machines, I thought it would be good to have a simple and straightforward guide to accommodate nodes on everyday machines. I think the spirit of the project calls for small #'s of nodes on huge #'s of machines and I sincerely doubt the vast majority of participants will be willing to go through what I see in the beta chats. I know the masterminds understand and are working towards a 10-click GUI set-it-and-forget-it launchpad, but I suspect the biggest hangup for most will be their router.
I’d be willing to bet that most people will be using ISP-provided gateways. Which begs the question then:
what is the most simple arrangement for efficient and effective node operation?
(ie. What can I (average JoeTimBob, or my Mom) do to make sure this node software thingy works (ie. runs 10 nodes) consistently without me having to do anything with it and earns a few nanos every month?)
But then, given the nature of the project, I’m thinking there will also be a lot of us in Linuxlandia with our own gateway, not quite ready yet for the Advanced Router Setup thread, but daring and brave and adventurous enough to forward some ports, set static IP’s, dynamicize our DNS, modify some .config files and do other things to our machines that would make normal people squeemish. Ah yes, the thrill seekers.
So for those of us not scared of CLI, but not necessarily super-savvy in the networking department, what’s the ideal setup with modest equipment and BW for running, say, 20-50 nodes?
Specific questions for me:
Is port forwarding better than --home-network? uPnP better still? without creating security issues?
Is a static IP advantageous ?
Or dynamic DNS?
Is there a human-accessible remedy for NAT limitations? Can I make a swap file/partition for my router to use??