I’m not sure a Mac is a good option for a mainnet node. It’s only suitable for tests. You need a baremetal server that is always on, because we receive thousands updates per second from the network. If you turn your laptop off, it will need half a day to catch up tomorrow. And I’m totally unsure that the notebook hardware is fast enough to process blockchain updates. It wouldn’t be feasible during eidos spamming, and is hardly feasible with current traffic.
Nice, we have some articles we have been working on for a few months but never seem to find the time to finish… I’ll try to increase my efforts.
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Could there be an incentive to run your own node outside of running your own chain or trying to be a BP. Would be nice for the average eos token holders to be incentivised to help the network with by running a node.
No, it needs skilled sysadmins. An average person can’t run a node.
You’re right that we need skilled sysadmins. It appears there’s shortage and someone needs to train them or at least provide support while they’re educating themselves. I found setting up an eosio node extremely difficult. I’ve found the biggest help from Aiden, Michael from EOS USA BP, Marcin Ch while the Yas community was setting up the chain. They created a Telegram group and assisted people willing to become BPs. Even if there’re some written guides and I followed some of them they weren’t up to date, some were already for advanced users, there were always some unexpected problems stemming from updates, different kind of software running on different devices etc. There’re not enough troubleshooting questions and answers. Asking for help is difficult as everyone has own time limits. The whole experience was frustrating. I never managed to become a BP because I didn’t manage to complete the last steps. I managed to write some simple smart contracts but even there were problems even if I was following the eos.io tutorials. Dan mentioned the endpoints, genesis file… just a few roadblocks.
Is Raspberry Pi a suitable device? If not what kind of structure one needs to be able to run a node for a while without upgrading it too often?
Check this out. It’s as comprehensive as I could do it
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Definitely not, you need an Intel compatible cpu, at least 8 GB RAM, and a bit faster hardware if it’s for an intensive network like EOS
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I can see value in having paid validator nodes to just run the eosio software and validate that the produced blocks are valid. It would require modifications to eosio to get it to work properly though.
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You can run EOSIO (with a few modifications) on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB), in small networks with little load it even works quite well. For production environments, however, this is absolutely not recommended.
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I guess some people would like to know how to do this
I need to see if I can still find the scripts and have the time to write a tutorial. It’s been a few months and I would like to test if it works with newer operating systems and EOS versions first. I basically did a remote-build with CLion and a Ubuntu 64Bit Beta for the Pi and worked my way through the bugs and problems. But I’ll put it on my todo list and see if I can invest a weekend to write a tutorial soon.
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I prefer spicy servers
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The i7 Intel NUCs handle EOS pretty well right now. They can perform as entry level hardware that’s capable of handling moderate amounts of EOS traffic. You wouldn’t want one as a primary API server and couldn’t touch history, but they’re suprisingly capable of producing bloks, acting as a p2p node, or even certain types of API services.
4.5ghz mobile processor, something like 50w power consumption, can handle multiple terabytes of storage (NVMe + SSD). Cost of maxing one out is anywhere between $1500-2000 USD.
We have 8 of them currently in our data center performing various tasks. I wouldn’t mind having more 
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Btw, there is an 8GB Raspberry Pi:
When you use the term EOS you really mean eosio.
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I mean EOS because setting up a generic eosio node is different.
+1 setting up a full EOS node from scratch is out of scope for starting (not funded) projects.
Guess he ment one of my answers where I was speaking about running EOS on a raspberry - which was a mistake. Already corrected it to EOSIO.
There’s a number of cheap and fanless x86_64 compatible computers. You would have much less headache running EOSIO on them, especially that wabt support is being dropped, and eosvm is not compatible with ARM.