[Tutorial] Run your own satellite (part 5) - Familiarize with jargon

Get yourself a coffee, today we dive.


New Jargon

(First, have a look at Glossary of Storj Network Terms - Storj Docs).

metabase: Not all segment (see in concepts link above) stored on the network, some are so small it best store directly on sat. Sat have 2 databases, one is the normal database called satellitedb, another one called metabase, metabase store segment less or equal 4kiB (configurable) directly inside database. Segment store inside metabase are not using erasure coding, not even it checksum are known to sat (it checksum verify can only be done after decrypt).

Storj/storj Binaries

certificates: in early day, it was used as Certificate Signing Server, nowaday it dead code.

connect-test: test connection (both TCP and QUIC) to a service that use an identity of a peer class.

convert-node-id: a utility tool, it most useful feature probably is to see difficulty level, for example:

./convert-node-id 12EayRS2V1kEsWESU9QMRseFhdxYxKicsiFmxrsLZHeLUtdps3S
base58 id: 12EayRS2V1kEsWESU9QMRseFhdxYxKicsiFmxrsLZHeLUtdps3S
hex id: a28b4f04e10bae85d67f4c6cb82bf8d4c0f0f47a8ea72627524deb6ec0000000
blob id: ukfu6bhbboxilvt7jrwlqk7y2tapb5d2r2tsmj2sjxvw5qaaaaaa
version: 0
difficulty: 30

crashcollect: a standalone service for crash collection, similar to datadog/sentry/new relic (?).

diskstat: a utility to monitor disk IO of a process (process as in operating system context).

filewalker-benchmark: a utility to benmark filewalker – probably become legacy after hashstore.

identity: a utility to generate identity of services.

jobq: a queue for repair jobs to be created when segments of data become unhealthy.

jobqtool: a tool to interact with jobq, it can import, len, peek, stat, trim, truncate queue in jobq.

is-valid-sj1-blob: check if blob is valid storj v1 – probably become dead code after hashstore.

metabase-listing-performance: performance benchmarking for listing objects in Storj’s metabase database (guess this one is the tool for benchmarking databases if it fit with the usage pattern of StorJ).

metabase-minimize-listing-csv: not sure what it is yet.

metabase-verify: not sure what it does yet.

metric-receiver: similar to crashcollect, a server to receive metric, combined these two together?

migrate-encryption-master-key:
In satellite-managed project, StorJ use a master key (currently google KMS service) to encrypt a random generated key (called passphrase) before store it in satellitedb. In the event they want to change master key, they will use this tool to decrypt/re-encrypt your passphrase (in self-managed project, you will be the one holding this passphrase).

om-license: Tool for granting Object Mount license entitlements.

piecestore-benchmark: probably become legacy after hashstore.

placement-test: test node placement, for variety purpose, for example: geofencing..

satellite: the satellite.

segment-verify: a diagnostic tool for to verifies whether uploaded file segments are actually present and accessible on the storage nodes where they’re supposed to be stored.

storj-admin: A web UI server for satellite operators to manage and administer a Storj satellite.

storj-sim: probably deprecated after storj/up?

versioncontrol: version control server, similar to https://version.storj.io/

Storj/edge Binaries

authservice: stores and manages Storj access grants, for other services like gateway-mt and linksharing call to.

authservice-admin: A CLI admin tool for operators to manage data inside authservice.

gateway-mt: multi-tenant S3-compatible gateway.

linksharing: The HTTP file-sharing and website-hosting service.


Note that: this is not an exhaustive list, I choose only which relevant to operate a satellite, and with time it will change. See you in part 6.

You can see difficulty with identity as well:

identity certificate-authority id --ca.cert-path <YOUR-CERTIFICATE_PATH>
2026-06-02T17:04:05+02:00       INFO    Anonymized tracing enabled
base58-check node ID:   1jMcSRUS1VhSii93A11oLEX6FyYtvhyrpUVZcFzMhPciYDs6ty
hex node ID:            316a4d635352555331566853696939334131316f4c45583646795974766879727055565a63467a4d68506369594473367479
node ID bytes:          [96 44 75 198 153 106 204 123 61 205 30 145 189 223 82 14 62 208 214 159 13 152 249 129 219 83 244 40 194 248 183 0]
difficulty:             8

There are lot’s of binaries which are not required to run your own satellite.

om-license, metric-receiver, metabase-*

You don’t need versioncontrol either, unless you plan to run your own storagenodes and it’s a private setup. Public storagenodes are using version.storj.io which is always the safest bet (as we rollout versions only after testing)

I would recommend to focus on satellite first. Also: I would suggest to run satellite-modular which is in ./satellite/satellite and ignore the ./cmd/satellite. We are migrating to the new binary. This is also a good choice because you can easily turn off components what you don’t need.

Start with satellite api as a first. Later continue with core and ranged-loop.