XMPP Service Operators - 2021-01-10

jayteeuk: that's what I have meant by disgusting. It was a bad response

I'm thinking about setting up a small (family only) xmpp server at home. Would a raspberry pi be OK for say 5-10 users? Not sure if anyone has any experience with that. Sorry if this isn't the right place.

Yeah, should be ok. You may want to pick ejabberd due to lower RAM usage

https://thomas-leister.de/en/migrating-trashserver-prosody-ejabberd/

I could have said the opposite, in my experience Prosody uses much lower amounts of memory on a small and medium-sized server. :)

Although I haven’t tried Ejabberd ever since I migrated off it to Prosody some years ago, it might have improved a lot since then.

Prosody currently takes me 49 MiB of RAM, for about three users daily.

It may have improved since that article was written. I'm running a small ejabberd server using 90 MiB, ie. both should be ok for a modern Rpi

"Too fast"

"Too fast"

I run ejabberd right now but, I've heard a lot of good things about prosody. It seems like 6 of one half a dozen of the other so. Thanks for the advice. I have a few pi's laying around so, figured I'd set something up

I run ejabberd on a bigger scale, I should say.

My other concern is having it securely accessed from outside my LAN. I guess that's the tradeoff of running on my own hardware rather than a VPS.

Mostly the same as running other types of home servers if you keep registration closed.

Yea, registration will be closed, plus it won't be federated.

A raspberry pi is more than enough dedotated wam

For modern pwosody

Sounds great.

Netbsd works great the the raspberry pis btw

Netbsd 9

I've had much improve stability over using linux on the pis

> jayteeuk: that's what I have meant by disgusting. It was a bad response Ah, gotcha. Yes, I agree. The whole thread makes for depressing reading.

Oh interesting. I've never played with the BSDs on a pi. I've ran OpenBSD on desktop here and there but, for me it never was what I needed at the time. I'll look at NetBSD. Thank you for the advice.

Netbsd also has much better memory management than linux

Sounds good. I'll play with it and see how it works for me. And it has no issues running prosody or ejabberd?

No

Great.

https://upload.nuegia.net/dd3aae15-315e-4eb1-87f0-930ac6998bc6/bsdhouse.png

at least it wasn't windows lol

Link Mauve: > I could have said the opposite, in my experience Prosody uses much lower amounts of memory on a small and medium-sized server. :) Does Prosody first cache uploaded files in memory?

argon3771: > I'm thinking about setting up a small (family only) xmpp server at home. Would a raspberry pi be OK for say 5-10 users? Not sure if anyone has any experience with that. Sorry if this isn't the right place. Pi1 at least 80 users Pi3+ al least 500 users

*SD card I/O limits actually, eg. Without http_upload up to 200 & 1500. *ejabberd/postgresql

Can you please share some _homeserver using experience_. I'm worried about SDcard, how long it will usually live ?

pick a random number and that will tell you

seriously though: you should not store things on a micro sd card, use an externally powered hard drive instead

The more activity happens on your server, the faster the card will die

they are generally not designed for extended activity (heat in particular), or constant writes

it may work months, years, but at some point it will fail, some times silently and then your data is toast

the same can be said about hard-drives 😉 That's why you should do backups :p

Kris, much less frequently though

(but yes, you should do backups)

ansd you generally can use SMART information to detect that in advance

also, SSDs are less prone to failure and cheap now

> Can you please share some _homeserver using experience_. I'm worried about SDcard, how long it will usually live ? Dunno Use only Sandisk Extreme/Ultra or Samsung EVO plus And backups

mathieui: > also, SSDs are less prone to failure and cheap now Usually, avoid cheap ones

well, I’m not talking about random off-brand names

but even crucial MX500 drives are not *that* expensive nowadays

and generally the failure rates are higher, but not by a lot, the difference in price often means a reduced cache (which is fine unless you want top-notch performance) and write endurance, which can be monitored

well, yes. SD cards generally do have quality issues, but with a good backup strategy they can work in low write scenarious. also it helps to run them with ample free space so that the flash memory can level the writes better.

Is A-Data offbrand? I think I've had them almost all changed after one year :( in a desktop context

Kris, that means disabling logs or writing most of them to tmpfs (but not possible when you are as constrained as a rpi)

I guess I should give a try to anything-sync-daemon for /var/log

That reminds me that I should probably need to change my SD too soon

Licaon_Kter, it is a brand but not a very reliable one :D, most of my cheapest SD cards are Adata and I do not trust them

mathieui: I mean A-Data SSDs

For RPi > Use only Sandisk Extreme/Ultra or Samsung EVO plus See those tests by someone

yeah but I have not even seen an A-Data SSD yet

They're the bestbuys of black fridays :(

not sure, but the only SSD I ever had to replace was indeed an Adata. Oh and a Lexar that didn't work properly in the first place.

(so far I have crucial, intel, kingston, sandisk and PNY here, no failure so far after years)

Watchout for Kingston...they have both good and bad series Eg. See the V300 scandal from years ago

oh, what happend there?

Yes, I stopped buying them anyway, but for €20 drives sustaining non-intensive usage, the drives are enough

Sent reviewers units, great scores In stores ship shitty memory chips

nowadays I’m optimizing for reliability rather than cost so I have shifted the prices a bit

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand

ah, actually switching chips after some months of sale seems to be more and more common with cheap SSDs. never trust reviews for those 😉

seems to be partially a supply chain issue and not malice

Thanks.. i'm planning to buy ssd for data, but until that it's working on sdcard. Hope it'll live half-year/year with little load (2 users now) and armbian-ramlog

2 users should be fine

Their HyperX line was ok, but after that experience the damage lasted. Can't recommend them anymore, nor A-Data (multiple series with failing units in non-server context)

I guess buying samsung makes sense since AFAIK they have their own production and thus do have less quality variance.

but on the other hand: backup, backup, backup 😉

Licaon_Kter: OK so the pi3 is way more than enough for what I need. Great.

I switched over my one pi to boot and run of a USB flash stick, I'll probably do it with this one too to get away from the SD card issue

actually why not using cheap used notebook mainboards instead of raspberry pi? :)

Arne: lower power, less space, arm :)

Licaon_Kter: some laptop mainboards doesnt use much more power, and whats the advantage of arm?

Eh

I can even set a normal PC to just consume 20 W

Arne: ain't that like 5x more than a FULLy used arm sbc? And it will sit idle mostly...

pi4 uses 15 Watt or not?

maximum

My (non-raspberry) SBC consumes at most 2.5W, as that’s what the power supply is rated for, and most of the time while it’s idle it consumes a lot less than that.

The one time I measured it it was a bit lower than 1W.

For comparison, my Thinkpad x280 consumes 2.7W on idle with the backlight set at minimum.

It can use up to 30W under full load, but it’s also much faster. :)

Depends on the SBC for sure. pi 4 uses 3A*5V

What SBC do you use Link Mauve ?

Arne, this one: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-LIME2/open-source-hardware

Been using it as my main server since 2014, and pretty happy with it. :)

nice :)

and open Hardware? :)

Yup. ^^

Arne: > pi 4 uses 3A*5V Is this the recommendation for the PSU (which would include powering the peripherials) or what the board only consumes? ✏

this is what the stock PSU provide, but I wouldn’t expect it to power peripherals

(because you can always go wayy beyond the power envelope with peripherals)

True. But pi3's default PSU was, like, 2.3 or 2.5 amps (the point is: not much less than pi4's), and, if I'm not mistaken, most of that was allocated for the peripherials. So the SoC's consumption should still be pretty low, be it pi3 or 4

well, the CPU in pi4 is much beefier than pi3, so I would expect consumption to increase

the PI4 is definity not the most power efficient arm SBC (22nm AFAIK), but the 15W is really worst case scenario

most the time it will near idle and use much less

and then you have to add the cooling fan to the power envelope :D

At least there _is_ an official fan now!

The main reason I'm using a Pi is because I have a few just laying around.

And I'm looking for some interesting things to do with them.

>Link Mauve: >> I could have said the opposite, in my experience Prosody uses much lower amounts of memory on a small and medium-sized server. :) Most of the problems are created not by real users, but by spammers. XMPP is not resource intensive.

For a family server, spammers are irrelevant, they won’t be able to create an account on an invite-only server.

Link Mauve, 1 GB of memory is enough for a home server. Can be run on smaller configurations as well. My record is 250 active users on 128 RAM along with the system) Prosody & Ejabberd / x86 32-bit. Debian 8 or 9

:)

Much depends on how you set it up. What version of the system and software to use. Rumor has it that some managed to run Ejabberd + OS on 64 megabytes (old software version)

I'll run it and see how it goes. I can't see having any more than 10 users. Maybe 15 at the absolute most if I get some friends to switch to it too. I have other options but, I figured the pi would be easiest. I could just spend the $5 a month for a small vps, less of a risk than running it on my own home network but, what fun would that be.

argon3771: which Pi?

Maybe this will give some points https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption

3b

thanks for this list ernst.on.tour

I serve a Pi3b+ for ~160 accounts, 40 active with 10-15 heavy active, no problem. Sometimes (after reboot when all sessions dropped and build up again) there are timeouts because sharedusergroups/bookmarkgroups need to build up for every of this 160 users at the same time. Therefor reboot is done at night.

That's great. that's way more than I need then. Does that also include more than messaging? The availability of voice calling for example or is your server strictly text/http uploads?

other than a lightweight STUN server to improve connections, voice calling in p2p in the current implementations and thus doesn't involve the server

*is

a TURN server might be too taxing for a Rasberry, but STUN should be no issue what so ever

Kris: it's about 60% of one core for video via TURN on 3+

ah, thats less than I expected

Also, it's used most of the time, have one user on a Wi-Fi and the STUN is not enough

you mean a publuc wifi?

*publc

*public

Kris: no, normal homes

really? didn't have that problem so far

Ah that's right. Forgot that its p2p. Still learning stuff.

I would think Wi-Fi totally depends on how the NAT of the Wi-Fi/WAN router works.

On mobile networks, you almost always need TURN relaying.