Uses for a few short-term VPSes
I'm cleaning house and have a few (7 +/- 1) VPSes that I'm not going to renew. They have at least 5 months remaining on the term and in one case over a year. They're generally lower-end, 0.5-4GB RAM, various storage/locations.
I'll probably make a couple available for transfer soon, but they're low-cost so in general the amount I'd recover wouldn't be worth it, particularly in cases where an admin fee is charged. So I was wondering whether any short-term community project makes sense.
They're already running nested LXC containers in a private/encrypted cloud. It would be trivial to hand out a few free LXC containers. But I'm hesitant to do this (even with severe constraints) because I don't want the headache of dealing with the inevitable abuse and I'm not sure if having it short-term (~6-ish months) is useful to anyone. Plus I don't have a provider tag and don't know where this would land me.
I did wonder about leveraging the encrypted cloud part - you could access the LXC in one location with storage mounted from another, for example. So for now I'll just put it out there for thoughts.
RAM Storage Processor (FSU) BW (TB) Location 0.5G 60GB 2x Ryzen 3700X 0.5 Amsterdam 0.5G 250GB 1x Xeon E5-2620 2.0 Amsterdam 1.0G 17GB 1x Xeon E5-2680 3.0 Amsterdam 2.0G 15GB 1x Xeon E5-2690 0.8 Buffalo 1.0G 15GB 1x ? 5.0 Chicago 1.0G 15GB 1x Ryzen 3950X 1.0 Dallas 1.0G 5GB 1x ? 1.0 Düsseldorf 4.0G 10GB 1x Xeon E5-2690 1.0 Hong Kong
It isn't a crisis if they just idle out, so not trying to force anything here.
(No, I won't give/sell/rent my account info to you; No, don't PM me asking for something)
Comments
You don't have to sell your account info you can just transfer them to others.
Team push-ups!
Hi @tetech! If you wanna give me the Dallas instance, it might be helpful. If you can sell the transfer, that's fine. If somebody else wants it for free, it's no big deal. I might just run some network tests involving your Dallas instance and two other servers I already have in Dallas.
Thanks for thinking of giving away stuff within the LES community! ✨💖
Tom. 穆坦然. Not Oles. Happy New York City guy visiting Mexico! How is your 文言文?
The MetalVPS.com website runs very speedily on MicroLXC.net! Thanks to @Neoon!
I'm interested in the 1st and second Amsterdam machines.
Team push-ups!
Perhaps the original post wasn't clear on this. For a small number, yes it does make sense to transfer, and for those ones I will generally ask for the pro-rated amount remaining on the term. That's the "I'll probably make a couple available for transfer soon" part. I'll do that separately.
However, for most on the list either (a) the VPS providers do not permit transfers, or (b) they are charging a high admin fee which in some cases is more than the renewal price of the VPS (if people want to pay it then OK, but I don't think there would be much interest). These ones I am basically expecting to be "stuck" with and am trying to do something useful besides idle them for 6-12 months.
what the price of each?
https://microlxc.net/index.php?p=deploy
I understand it is only for short-term but if you eventually go handing out any LXC container, I would still love to try it out.
That's irrelevant, since they're not up for transfer at this moment.
If you want to collaborate more generally on network tests in Dallas, let me know. I have 8 KVMs being actively used in Dallas at the moment. Unfortunately they are a bit concentrated at Carrier-1 but I've got a few at other DCs like Infomart and Digital Realty.
good luck with that. people do not read, they only "look". and all they see is a list of possibly cheap service and the word transfer somewhere in between - no matter the context.
you probably won't get any useful answers to your actual question anyway, but tons of question like who, where, when, and most importantly: how much
True, true.
And….
There is the ever popular
$7 !
VPS reviews | | MicroLXC | English is my nth language.
https://microlxc.net/index.php?p=deploy
Two ideas:
(assuming they come with a dedicated/unlimited CPU, or the provider gives clear limits e.g. no more than 30% of CPU that you could apply on the thing with cpulimit or a cgroup or something )
1. Check my sig
2. http://warrior.archiveteam.org/
Contribute your idling VPS/dedi (link), Android (link) or iOS (link) devices to medical research
This is what I'm running on servers with spare I/O.
I use Docker setup for straightforward CPU limits, and haven't ruffled any feathers so far.
Where's @skorupion on the Reddit leaderboard?
I think it is quite funny how @Ganonk subtracted $2! It's been added to Best-of-LES!
Tom. 穆坦然. Not Oles. Happy New York City guy visiting Mexico! How is your 文言文?
The MetalVPS.com website runs very speedily on MicroLXC.net! Thanks to @Neoon!
Also
Possible that
@Ganonk hangs around with @FAT32 a lot.
.#squeezeadeal
VPS reviews | | MicroLXC | English is my nth language.
Thanks for the ideas. First one is no go since none of the cores are dedicated and ToS for most of the plans specifically disallows such distributed compute. Second one seems more viable. I'll look at that, thanks again for the idea.
Nice, that's me on the list! I should go and find some idler to not loose the spot. :P
"loose" is not skint.
It should be "lose".
If they would be bigger, more memory and disk, you could run your own microLXC and rent them for whatever.
Free NAT KVM | Free NAT LXC
Where to get the webapp of microLXC control software?
LXD has a JSON API right, he in theory could build it.
Free NAT KVM | Free NAT LXC
It ain't microLXC if it isn't microLXC control software.
We want the real microLXC control software.
That's what she said.
Free NAT KVM | Free NAT LXC
How much time do you spend dealing with tech support and/or abuse in that case? Or do your eligibility filters largely solve that.
Technically, the LXC containers are already running. Potentially there's some things could be done, e.g. 6x 128M on the Amsterdam 1G and then NFS mount 30-40GB disk. From memory they're both in Equinix.
root@debtest:/# free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 128 9 86 6 31 118 Swap: 256 0 256 root@debtest:/# df -k Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/vg0/debtest 1992552 482728 1388584 26% / none 492 4 488 1% /dev devtmpfs 497900 0 497900 0% /dev/tty tmpfs 503716 0 503716 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 503716 6648 497068 2% /run tmpfs 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lockNearly zero, maybe 1-2 requests per week, abuse is usually 1 or 2 per year.
Free NAT KVM | Free NAT LXC
Really? She asked you for the software? #doubt
At least I put a routed /64 in each LXC, in this case via tunnelbroker.
# ./mlxc.sh add --name=debtest2 --mem=128M --swap=256M --disk=2G --cpu=10 --distro=debian --rel=bullseye CREATING CONTAINER... Using image from local cache Unpacking the rootfs --- You just created a Debian bullseye amd64 (20220108_05:24) container. To enable SSH, run: apt install openssh-server No default root or user password are set by LXC. CONFIGURING RESOURCES... CONFIGURING NETWORK... # lxc-attach -n debtest2 root@debtest2:~# ping6 -c 5 google.com PING google.com(dfw25s25-in-x0e.1e100.net (2607:f8b0:4000:80e::200e)) 56 data bytes 64 bytes from dfw25s25-in-x0e.1e100.net (2607:f8b0:4000:80e::200e): icmp_seq=1 ttl=120 time=1.07 ms 64 bytes from dfw25s25-in-x0e.1e100.net (2607:f8b0:4000:80e::200e): icmp_seq=2 ttl=120 time=1.40 ms 64 bytes from dfw25s25-in-x0e.1e100.net (2607:f8b0:4000:80e::200e): icmp_seq=3 ttl=120 time=1.05 ms 64 bytes from dfw25s25-in-x0e.1e100.net (2607:f8b0:4000:80e::200e): icmp_seq=4 ttl=120 time=1.40 ms 64 bytes from dfw25s25-in-x0e.1e100.net (2607:f8b0:4000:80e::200e): icmp_seq=5 ttl=120 time=1.40 ms --- google.com ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 8035ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.052/1.261/1.399/0.165 ms root@debtest2:~# free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 128 7 97 0 22 120 Swap: 256 0 256 root@debtest2:~# df -k Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/vg0/debtest2 1992552 339264 1532048 19% / none 492 4 488 1% /dev devtmpfs 497904 0 497904 0% /dev/tty tmpfs 503716 0 503716 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 201488 44 201444 1% /run tmpfs 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lockWhat's in your
mlxc.sh?It looks useful.
I'm using Debian 11
lxc-unpriv-createcommand.It can't set any limits on the container, so that every container could use all the RAM and disk on the host machine.
Not really a problem for internal use though.
The essence of it (cutting out the parameter parsing etc.):
echo "CREATING CONTAINER..." DOWNLOAD_KEYSERVER="keyserver.ubuntu.com" lxc-create --vgname=vg0 -B lvm -n ${NAME} --fssize ${DISK} -t download -- -d ${DISTRO} -r ${REL} -a amd64 echo "CONFIGURING RESOURCES..." echo "lxc.cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes = ${MEM}" >> /var/lib/lxc/${NAME}/config echo "lxc.cgroup.memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes = ${SWAP}" >> /var/lib/lxc/${NAME}/config cyc=`echo "50000 100 / ${CPU} * p" | dc` echo "lxc.cgroup.cpu.cfs_quota_us=${cyc}" >> /var/lib/lxc/${NAME}/config echo "lxc.cgroup.cpu.cfs_period_us=50000" >> /var/lib/lxc/${NAME}/config echo "CONFIGURING NETWORK..." hwa0="00:16:3e:$(openssl rand -hex 3| sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//')" sed -i -e "s/^\(lxc.net.0.hwaddr\).*/\1 = ${hwa0}/" /var/lib/lxc/${NAME}/config lxc-start -n ${NAME} lxc-attach -n ${NAME} -- sed -i -e "s/iface eth0.*/iface eth0 inet6 auto/" /etc/network/interfaces lxc-attach -n ${NAME} -- bash -c 'echo "nameserver 2606:4700:4700::1111" > /etc/resolv.conf' lxc-attach -n ${NAME} -- bash -c 'echo "nameserver 2606:4700:4700::1001" >> /etc/resolv.conf'I haven't bothered making my own templates, at least yet. These are unprivileged containers.