u/Glade_Art

A little while ago I made a post about my basement server which runs Glade Art. Now here is my other server.

This little guy looks very similar to my most powerful PC, except it fits in the palm of your hand. It's a server, and a very flashy one.

This PC is hosting nothing other than trash vs garbage sites. Here's a list:

https://doggydogdog.xyz:8443 - this site is an infinite pool of slop; a tar pit for bots disguised as a github-like clone. It's not in the best condition rn, and the domain is expiring in like 2 days. It had a good run, serving about 15 million requests in the span of a few months. It will be back better than ever on a new domain.

https://hatehub.net - I have a plan to make a "funny" social media platform for hating. It will mostly use existing code from Glade art, so it won't be hard to make. It will look and feel completely different tho. I bought the domain, and put this filler "coming soon" slop site up for now. Oh, and yes, this has a tar pit too: https://hatehub.net/tarpitexample of course.

74.79.156.187:6868/ - good old no domain name tar pit. These guys are actually equally as effective for trapping bots, with 10 million requests from anthropic on a clone of it. Very lightweight sloppers, there are a bunch of these out there, hosted by me and other people. Takes the data from the poison fountain, see r/PoisonFountain for more info. Hatehub's pit takes it from there too.

So yeah, this little raspberry handles a ton of traffic just fine

Pi 5, 8gb ram, 128gb nvme ssd.

(A tar pit is an endless maze of trash data for bots to scrape, and they do. Most bots these days scrape data for AI training, so this gives them trash data for AI training).

This is my main home server, being a rather ancient PC lol, but it gets the job done just fine. A bit of a basement build, but don't mind; it's cooler down here.

It hosts my website: https://gladeart.com

Specs:

i5 4460

16gb ddr3

GT 710 (just for graphics; it's a goated card, but will be replaced with an Arc A380 in the future to do video compression).

1tb SSD, and a 2tb HDD (for backups and stuff).

1tb doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're storing images/short videos like I am, it is. Assuming each image is 1mb large on average, 1tb can store 1 million of those. Though they are much smaller than 1mb on average. And that can easily be upgraded if needed.

The server has been running 24/7 for the past 1 year, 3 months, and 7 days (since when the site originally launched). The motem is just chilling on the ceiling.

Oh, and yes, I just recently was given that desk, and I plan on replacing that glass with plywood/metal very soon. Glass is cool and all until it just shatters.

My previous post showed an early prototype, but this here is the updated version. I found a way to cleanly slice the can in half. Instead of being a case fan, the fan is now a cpu fan. Despite there being very little holes for airflow, the temps aren't bad, not reaching over 65c on extended max load l; better than the first version. It sort of blows the air around inside of there, and the heat escapes through the paper thin aluminum walls.

As before, this is an audio player PC for my sound system, running moode player os. Pi 4b 2gb ram inside.

Yeah, audio player PC running moode player os.

This pc build is to be an audio player for my sound system for music. Uses mood audio player as an os. It has an rgb fan outake on top to keep things cool, and a bunch of holes near the bottom of the can so the air can intake.

This is a super simple to set up tar pit. No need for a domain name even, because this does an IP:port HTTP site. Fetches all the text from the Poison Fountain. Just one file needed to run it. It runs it on a bunch of ports too. Extremely lightweight slopper too, you can probably host it using a Raspberry Pi 3 even.

Here is an example site running this: http://72.224.144.234:5500

Download here: https://gladeart.com/go/17844982408542o2q-7FbukxCuxBFh4Qej1mVMxlCA_QrtNsF6PszLwE

I've done some experiments, and they show that the bot swarms scrape these no domain HTTP sites just fine. So yeah, that means that as long as you have port forwarding on your router, you can pump out tons of slop every day too!

And yeah, you can hook this up to a domain too if you want.

Original content btw, haha.

Scarecrow (DC Comics)

https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Scarecrow

My most popular and oldest tar pit, gladeart (DOT) com/data-export has done over 30 million serves to bots in total, as of now. Gzip bomb pages like gladeart (DOT) com/saturn_strike are cool, but they just aren't popular among bot swarms because they aren't good for crawling. And that is why I came up with a solution:

When the pit hits over 2000 global RPMs, it becomes a gzip bomber, sending gzip bombs which are small for the server to upload, but very large to decompress. Under 2000 RPMs it functions normally as it has before. This new update just rolled out today.

It's just ideal because it's attractive to bots due to the attractive text in the tar pit, but then it switches to a gzip bomber for the next minute. And best of all, this happens during busy hours because of its mechanism.

Be careful if you go onto there as it may be busy and gzip bomb you, potentially causing the tab to crash. Btw, scraping some random site like this at 2000 requests per minute while rotating IPs aggressively to avoid rate-limiting is not respectful at all by any means, and they are also not listening to the robots.txt which explicitly disallows them from going into the pits. So I would consider these as bad bots that deserve to be gzip striked.

Thanks for reading!

Yeah so we RCers use these kind of fans for cooling off the motors and ESCs of RC cars. They're made for brutal air-flow and durability, not for efficiency or quietness. And these little beasts use up a lot of power, way too much for the Pi's board.
The CPU temp results:
~49c stabilized under long, max load.

I think a larger heat-sink would make a big difference, as this one is very tiny. I probably wouldn't recommend this kind of fan because they vibrate a lot, that might be a problem for the Pi over time.

With the current malware problem.