Project Firelink
Intent:
To accumulate, preserve, and especially where possible, share the best in educational, children's, and public domain materials, and to support work that serves the public good.
tmp doc
Frist Post!
26-9-2025I've got a handy barebones system in place for making updates here now. And now some other updates:
Stable server is stable! Content gathering proceeds! We've survived the reddit hug of death twice, from all technical and functional standpoints, and are pushing over 40tb(!) traffic in our first month, with plenty of room to grow. For now, we're mirroring several TB of data from annas-archive.org and academictorrents.com via bittorrent, largely scientific data such as climate change (NOAA) and research/medical (CDC, FDA) and various sciences (NASA etc) as well as serving a small temporary directory of test files for direct download to load/config test the webserver. That webserver is getting moved to its own dedicated machine soon, as I'll be donating an HP G3 (or perhaps even G5?) mini for that purpose. This part will slowly grow into our own curated set of the most significant files, and receive proper categorization and so forth. I continue to work on some back end stuff to automate or at least ease some basic things, like content acquisition and the aforementioned indexing. Things are coming together nicely.
Near-future plans:
Extra functionality to the blog poster such as markdown and img support
Content suggestion form with optional file attachments
Live traffic and storage stats
Download counters in index of hosted files
Domain registration [$]
HBA card to ease cost and complexity of future storage expansion [$]
MOAR STORAGE (eventually) [$$$]
Most importantly, I'm committing some time to finding more *sources* of important content - looking for ways to track what's being deleted, buried, or just threatened, so we can grab those quickly. The traffic from hosting just a couple US gov't studies that had been taken down has validated this whole project.
Updates
Sept 2 2025: Project Firelink established quite by accident during a Hollow Knight stream, and initial support provided by lilmongoose, wolfdingus, DarcLight, Kyndrede, and Chris_FirefoxSept 3: Acquired used HP G4 i5 7500 (4 core 4 thread) small form factor desktop for prototyping the system and services we will need.
Sept 5: Ordered 2x 14tb server HDDs, will take 2-3 weeks
Sept 6: Initial OS and services stack install and testing on spare drives. Acquired 500gb set of torrents and large files for performance checks and mirroring/backups scheme development
Sept 8: Donated my spare desktop, Ryzen 9 3900X with 48gb RAM, after considering other options to eliminate some very clear performance concerns. Implications: 12 core 24 thread with relatively low power consumption both at idle and under load. Will upgrade to 128gb RAM later as need arises. Can swap to proper server case for cheap when we need more than 4 drives. G4 will still play an important role in backups and project services, allowing us to do this the right way, from the beginning.
Sept 9: New server in testing. Immense improvements. Prototyping continues.