Installed on a Dell Optiplex 3050 Micro series - i5 CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVME… installation was very smooth and easy, BTC Core sync took only 3 days to complete. Strongly recommended!
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Successfully installed 0.3.4~4 on
Acer Swift 1 - Intel N5000, 8GB RAM, 2TB NVMe
Currently running
- Bitcoin Core
- electrs
- Mempool
- LND
- ThunderHub
- Lightning Terminal
with electrs and Mempool still testing at the moment.
Had to shut those two off for a while because of super heavy load on all cores.
But then I noticed that hibernation was the culprit, when the lid was closed.
Just fixed it and those cores finally have some room to breath.
Thanks to SpiralCrunch and whoever helped for that post boot script for automation,
didn’t know how todo that.
So far everything looks good, I just hope 8GB is enough to keep this running for a while.
Setup&Installation went smooth, Bitcoin IBD took about 3 days, electrs-index another ~12hours.
Maybe would’ve been a bit faster if I just had found that hibernation-problem earlier, but I’m not complaining.
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I have StartOS 0.3.4~4 running on an Ace Magic T8 plus. Has an Intel 12th gen N95 CPU, 256gb SSD, 8GB DDR5. Total hardware cost: $160 + Ethernet cable. Will probably end up attaching an external SSD to it. Not sure if it has a second nvme slot… Overall pretty satisfied with the performance, and very satisfied with how small it is.
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WiFi did not work out of the box, but I don’t really care… so I haven’t tried SSHing in and fixing the drivers.
The nonfree image usually supports more wireless drivers - did you use that?
Regardless, we advise to always use ethernet, and we are considering deprecating wireless support entirely. Your server deserves the fastest and most reliable possible connection, as you want to aim for high uptime.
Successfully installed StartOS 0.3.4.~4 on the custom build listed below.
Build:
MB: GIGABYTE C246M-WU4 (rev. 1.0)
CPU: Intel Core i3-9100
Cooler: Noctua NH-L9i
RAM: 1 x 32GB Kingston ECC UDIMM KTL-TS432E/32G
PSU: CORSAIR RM650x (2021) CP-9020198-NA
M.2: Team Group MP34 M.2 2280 4TB PCIe 3.0 x4 with NVMe 1.3
Case: Fractal Design Core 1100, Black
Services:
Bitcoin Core 25.0.0~3
Vaultwarden 1.29.0~4
Here’s some more explanation/rationale on the build in another post I created when I was trying to figure out whether to use a hypervisor or install it bare metal (decided on bare metal).
I know I’m only running 2 services, but I’m thrilled with the power efficiency of this thing! It currently idles around 13 watts. It initially idled around 20 watts and then I made all the recommended BIOS settings changes that I could find that helped with power efficiency. Bitcoin Core fully sync’d in about 20 hours, during which it was drawing around 50 watts. Its also super quiet! Basically silent
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Success installing StartOS v0.3.4:
Dell Precision M4800 Laptop
CPU: Core-i7-4900MQ 2.8Ghz
Nvidia Quadro K2100M GPU
Mem: 32GB RAM
HDD: Crucial SSD 1TB
1Gb Ethernet
*BIOS set to UEFI boot, had to choose grub.efi manually in bios boot device choices from HDD.
**First boot post install did not find a bootable image, stating ‘invalid partition type’. Would not boot if the BIOS is set to Legacy boot mode. TPM/secureboot is disabled.
GPU support worked great!
Supermicro MOBO (X11SSH-F ) intel Xeon E3-1280 V6 SR325 4 core CPU Processor / 3.90GHz / 8MB Cache / LGA1151 with 32gb ram ECC 2x16gb ECC ram. using an old 480 kingston SSD - but have 3 4tb WD red HDD - would ike to setup up as a RAID server - Should i setup/ format drives first then intal StartOS? or can i run start OS off SSD then have RAID drives separate? WIll be fucking around to find out this weekend…ANy tips would greatly apprcieate.
You can install the OS to the SSD, but unless it is very small, it would be a waste of space. All services and user data are on the main data drive(s). We highly recommend against HDDs for this reason - you will have significantly reduced performance on a spinning disk versus an SSD.
Hello,
I am considering purchasing a 2023 macmini M2 or M2 pro with 2 TB SSD flash-drive.
Is it feasible to run StartOS and MacOS on the same device…?
Also could I run a linux distro…pop! OS as well on the same device.
thanks
Rob
Also came across the System76 Meerkat mini server…wondering how this would compare with the server pro or pure….
Sorry I’m not sure what you mean by unless it is very small? - the SSD is 480GB so would not really hold a full bitcoin node - I was trying to understand a way to get the OS working through the SSD load applications etc and have a full node backed up in a RAID 5 configuration on my 3x 4tb HDD drives.
One of the reasons for this is to have the speed loading things on the front end but access to the drives can be slow as they are more archival - also have backup photos, media server… The advantage of the HDD is the lower power consumption also - they can turn off to an extent.
Do I need to setup the RAID array before I install the RADI 5 or can I do it with my SSD and hot swap in my drives?
Please let me know what I have right/wrong?
thanks
Sam
This is more of a question for Apple than for Start9. I imagine there is some sort of hypervisor or VM software that you could use to accomplish this, but I don’t know.
Regarding the System76 Meerkat - this ought to work and it looks like it has plenty of horsepower for StartOS. It would be nice to get their mini PC added to our list here, so please let us know if you get this running.
Meaning that the OS does not need much space (<32GB), and so you would be wasting 400GB of space as it will never be used by the system.
I understand why you want this style of setup, but StartOS does not have advanced storage features yet. This will likely come next year. Currently your only option is to install everything to one drive, or the OS on one drive and the services/data will reside on a second. As I said, you will get a huge performance loss if you use spinning disks at this time.
If you choose to do this anyway, you will have to have the RAID set up before installing StartOS, as again, it will only allow installation to what it thinks is a single drive (a pre-configured RAID array can accomplish this). Some folks have also had success with a hardware RAID card.
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Is there a way to install StartOS on a headless PC (no monitor/video output) using UART console?
StartOS is typically installed and run in a “headless” manner, which is recommended. I don’t believe anyone has tested a console set up before, and we don’t support this method, so you would be on your own to figure this out. It may be possible, however. Please let us know if you have success with this.
Successful install of StartOS 0.3.4.4 (kiosk mode) on a PC ATX Asus Z97-E motherboard and 2TB M.2 Nvme single disk.
I installed Nextcloud and was eventually able to access it over my LAN after figuring out how to connect to it by using the router DHCP address so that I could download the cert onto a Windows machine where I could trust it.
Needless to say, the doc could use some tweaks, IMHO. 
https://start.local never worked even after installing Bonjour. After I trusted the cert, the address https://encoded-talon.local did work, where encoded-talon.crt was the name of the cert file (and internal cert name) that I trusted. I kept a list of all the places where I got stuck, in case it might help the doc effort.
Anyhow, the server and Nextcloud are up and running. I sent out some invitations to friends to try to use it with the onion addresses that they have never seen, just to see if the server is visible outside my LAN. Credit to the StartOS guys for creating a completely different sysadmin experience than the ones I was used to for 20 years in the past.
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Did you try start.local with http instead of https by chance? It definitely works in all our tested cases, so I’d like to know what you did that was unique - we may need to open a new discussion for this.
Hi Dave, thank you for your gentle way of asking delicate questions (“Did you… by chance?”). I wish my boss was as good as you. I tried start.local with three strings in the browser address bar:
- “start.local”,
- “http://start.local”, and
3), “https://start.local”.
I tried all of them several times, but all of them failed. The trusted cert worked the first time, once I figured out that I had to type the cert name into the browser bar. (IMHO, the doc could be improved a bit by including a specific example of this.)