This is a little overview about how this forum is hosted.
Pictures
You can see the discussion on toot.wales.
Hardware
We host this on a Rock64 2GB RAM board. It is located in the makerspace. Port forwarding is done by the firewall on ports 443 and 80. We use a 128 GB SD card.
Software
Here is how to setup the operating system. I had the best luck with the one with the GUI:
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-prepare-a-sd-card
This shows that discourse can be set up for a community on such a small server:
Accounts
- @niccokunzmann is admin on the forum
- @niccokunzmann has root access to the server
- @niccokunzmann has access to the mailjet.com account
- @niccokunzmann has access to the reply email account (AmmanValleyMakerSpaceForum at gmail.com)
- @niccokunzmann has access to the domain foss.wales which redirects to the noip host name
- @niccokunzmann and the makerspace firewall have access to the noip account for dynamic domain name service (the makerspace firewall received a new ip every once in a while)
I am happy to add a few names to the list to reduce the bus factor.
Story
Hardware The latest Raspberry Pis are too expensive, 2nd hand and sold out - they seem to be very popular. The Pine phone created a lot of similar hardware, so we got that.
The Raspberry Pi that we had is a Raspberry Pi 2 and as such it can not be used - not enough RAM, also 64 bit seems to be required and is there for the latest Raspberry Pis and of cause the Pine64 board.