For a while now I’ve wanted to get more involved in deeper things within the Hive ecosystem itself. I however have been quite apprehensive about taking that step. It all takes me far outside of my own comfort zone, has higher risks involved, lots of learning, and things like reoccurring costs for doing so.
The nice thing about Hive that I feel sets it apart from so many other blockchains out there is the opportunity to get involved with things, learn, and grow. So many other blockchains out there lack a real community aspect that helps facilities such things.
When it was announced that the community could get involved in setting up claim nodes to help decentralize the process of the Larynx miner token drops I thought that was amazing. Even more so if it was going to have a low barrier to entry and just about anyone who wants to should be able to do so.
Which is exactly what it ended up being. For now, at least a $5 server and a few lines typed out and you can deploy one of these half-asleep in the middle of the night instead of sleeping. While I’m not an expert on a lot of things involved in doing so I found it quite easy.
I do have a little bit of experience at least using Linux although it’s not my daily driver and I tend to go months without going near it. It’s not my first time having to SSH into something. I also from a gamer point of view have had to deploy servers in the past they just tended to be a little more key turn over these past few years with little involvement on my part.
This by no means is going to be a guide whatsoever of the process. I’ve looked at a couple of guides and I highly recommend checking out Bala’s setup guide. It’s so easy I’m shocked more have not taken this as an opportunity to do something new and learn a little.
In talking with a few people in seeing if they are going to set up a node I’ve discovered many did not know you can pay to rent a server with Hive using Privex. This is something I’ve been wanting to test out for a while now and this was a great excuse to do so.
For $5 a month and you can pay in Hive which makes doing something like this long term if costs remain reasonable quite easy to do. Even more so if the rewards we get for doing so end up covering or coming close to the costs of running a server.
One thing I’m always apprehensive about doing is anything regarding playing around with account keys. For that, I decided since I’m still learning to do some things it would be best done on a fresh separate account. That way if I somehow mess up it’s at least a mostly empty account. That removes a lot of the stress on my end.
From there it was as simple as knowing how to SSh in and typing out a couple of Linux commands. Since I already have a development environment for working on games I had a way to SSH in without needing to go and install anything like PuTTy. I could just open up CMD and SSH with my log-in details.
I don’t know why but I always love the art style you get to enjoy after logging into a server. For some reason, it just feels homely in a good way and inviting.
While I was going to do some basic security-related things I discovered the server I rented already had them installed and everything was updated. There are still some things I want to play around with but those are not needed for now in just getting things up and running.
After typing in a few Linux commands given in the guide for setting up a claim node and waiting for things to do their things I was almost done.
The small issue I ran into was not being able to claim any fake Larynx at the time. I went to claim and nothing happened. Since I had created a fresh account I switch over to another account that had some Hive and therefore should have had some tokens. That was later resolved once their chain got caught up.
After that, I was able to stake and now I’m listed as a node in consensus. I check occasionally to make sure I’m still signing blocks but outside of that it’s off on its own doing its things.
I even had the fun experience of them deploying an update and me needing to patch. Since this is rather active I would expect at least for now to need to do something daily if you are not using an auto-update script. Unless you run into any issues it’s just a couple of minutes and then you are off doing other things.
The only thing I have not messed around with yet is a domain for the node. Since it’s listed as optional and not everyone is doing it right away I’ll wait for there to be a couple of guides out there going about doing so in different ways. Then I might mess around with setting that part up as well.
Final Thoughts
Overall it was quite a painless and enjoyable experience. I got to do some new things, learn a little bit and get a more in-depth view of things. I’m also now supporting this by running a node. This is not the only project out there where you can do such things. Who knows what else I’ll play around with in the future.
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