Building an ARM64 home server the hard way
Got myself a Pi, a plastic box, a memory card, a big usb key, wrote my own SMTP server in super lean no-libc C (c89 with benign bit of c99&#x2F;c11), put a devuan GNU&#x2F;linux (NOT debian with its toxic trashy bloat and kludge of systemd).<p>I did the same thing with a nanomimal http server to serve static content and maybe dynamic in the future: a noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html http server for maps (which uses openstreet map tiles), which does provide proper map display in links2, with a font not too big, and with harmless html tables.<p>Configured the &quot;server&quot; to restart everything if something is detected missing (you know, cron with SH scripts and certainly not bash scripts).<p>It has been running for years. I never had to modify the code of my smtp server, yet (and I run IPv4 and native IPv6 provided by default to millions of clients by my ISP, I think it has been the case for more than a decade, may be wrong about this one though). I am kind of surprise it was not already pown by some trashy hackers.<p>The main issue: spamhaus block lists, they are hostile to all self-hosted people and they don&#x27;t provide a irc server, or a non blocked email to be removed from their lists (which are unfortunately used by too many open source related companies&#x2F;project, which is a mistake). Basically, they force ppl to use one of google&#x2F;apple super heavy javascripted web engine (no better than the default security checks from cloudflare). Yes, those ppl are seriously worse than spam itself, hope they will fix that (they are a shaddy swiss-andoran company...).<p>Did you know you cannot send an email to redhat(IBM now) people using an ipv6 smtp? yeah...<p>And it is coming: I&#x27;ll move everything to a similar RISC-V mini-computer because I am aware of the super toxic IP tied to arm64 ISA (same for x86_64), that will be the first step, the 2nd step will be to hand compile (=assembly programming with near Zero-SDK) all of them and forget this C syntax too complex and those horribly massive and complex compilers, not stable on the long run (thanks ISO, gcc extensions and c++). And with all that, I would not be surprise to port to 64bits RISC-V assembly a minimal IPv6 stack... and maybe more.