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Ask HN: What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

#11
Lichess has a distributed network for analyzing chess games with Stockfish:

https://lichess.org/get-fishnet

https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet

There's also the Mersenne prime search which passed some milestones recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...

Re: Ask HN: What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

#15
post #5

I originally built my home server for academic use (computational physics), but after changing in security I've come to use it as a fuzzing playground. Oftentimes I kick off a fuzzer on some OSS, e.g., GCC, v8, standard *nix binaries, and let it run for days/weeks/months. If I find anything I submit it to the appropriate people or make a PR, if Im motivated enough that week

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Re: Ask HN: What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

#16
If you want to support indie Blender artists, sheep-it[0] has been around for years and lets you use your free CPU/GPU to render user-submitted 3D projects. You get points for rendering, which you can then use to submit your own jobs for distributed rendering.

https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com

Re: Ask HN: What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

#18
post #5

I originally built my home server for academic use (computational physics), but after changing in security I've come to use it as a fuzzing playground. Oftentimes I kick off a fuzzer on some OSS, e.g., GCC, v8, standard *nix binaries, and let it run for days/weeks/months. If I find anything I submit it to the appropriate people or make a PR, if Im motivated enough that week

This sounds very interesting and potentially quite fun. How would one get into this? Is there a specific tool chain you use?

Learning how to is half the fun!

There's a bunch of good tutorials out there on [dumb] fuzzing (presumably where you'll start). One starting point I'd recommend is taking a binary that accepts input from stdin and making some proof-of-concepts with AFL (https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/).

If you'd rather start from a code/library perspective (and not CLI), I'd recommend libfuzzer (https://github.com/Dor1s/libfuzzer-workshop/).

There's a lot of other fuzzers, techniques, and depth to the field, but I'd recommend inch worming through (speed up as you gain more comfort). The Fuzzing Book is good to help you understand the logic behind techniques and strategies (https://www.fuzzingbook.org/)

As for some management, there's a few decent "monitoring" systems out there; personally I just SSH in and check the fuzzer manually (I leave it running in a tmux pane), but if that's not your cup of tea I've heard good things about OneFuzz (https://github.com/microsoft/onefuzz) and LuckyCat (https://github.com/fkie-cad/LuckyCAT).

Happy to answer any specifics of the sort :)

Re: Ask HN: What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

#19
post #17

Please consider running a Tor Relay, relays are the backbone of the Tor network https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay/

Doesn't this have the potential to cause issues for your home network?

If you run an exit node, definitely. If not, you should be fine.

Re: Ask HN: What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

#20

Please consider running a Tor Relay, relays are the backbone of the Tor network https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay/

Just make sure you understand that the IP will be publicly listed even if you run a relay and most likely banned by some organizations. Wasn’t a big deal in 2012, today I would be hesitant to run this at home.
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