Shout out to the Cardano Community… calling all SPOs and SMEs! to collaborate on a current (2024-2025) and comprehensive guide for installing and running Cardano nodes from home.
The SCOPE - Bottom Line Up Front:
Everything you need to run and SPO from home. from the router to the nodes and everything in between to make it secure and maintainable.
As a stake pool operator, you know how crucial a seamless and secure node setup is. Let’s join forces to share knowledge, best practices and expertise in creating an updated guide for those who want to run their nodes from their home networks, contribute to the decentralization and also learn how to do things based on community experiences.
Background and the WHY: with all the information on the internet scattered in various places, I have not found a current and comprehensive guide of an A-Z setup of cardano nodes for someone who wants to run them at their home network. The information is out there, but it’s like a scavenger hunt where you have to stitch everything together and hope it won’t fall apart on you (at least that’s my experience. if you point me to one or have one such guide then this will be the shortest thread here and I’ll shut up and go back to google school to learn how to search the internet, lol). I want to share my journey here and solicit input from the community.
What this Thread is NOT
- it is not for preaching that this is the only way, the best way or better than other implementation setups.
- it is not for passing any judgements, complaints or criticisms on any existing setup guides, instructions, Cardano developer site (which is a fantastic resource) etc.
I’m creating this thread to document and share my approach and any challenges / experiences of getting started as an SPO without hosting the nodes in the cloud. I plan to share my journey and collaborate with the community on this forum in hopes that this will help others in similar place on their Cardano journey.
I think this can be a beautiful journey together, we’ll learn together, we’ll cry together (probably) and definitely celebrate victories together.
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Proposed setup to start:
- hosted from home / residential broadband ISP
- one or two mini PCs (e.g. Beelink SER 5) for relay(s) & BP, + airgaped pc
- Proxmox as virtualization server for docker containers
- router running OpenWRT
- IDS/IPS ++ other security tools
Goals:
- Create a comprehensive, community-driven guide (2024-2025) to running SPO from home in an easiest and most secure fashion possible.
- a baseline design for Cardano Universal Build Environment @home
- TBD as things develop
What to expect:
- Collaborative discussion on node setup, Docker and Proxmox (or other options if better suited), network and security setup on your home network.
- Sharing of expertise and experiences.
- Joint creation of a step-by-step guide.
- learning a lot
Benefits:
- Improved node reliability and performance.
- Enhanced security through best practices.
- Contribution to the Cardano community.
Let me know what you think, and join if you want to contribute to this effort. 