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Rejoice! MetalVPS Is Here!

Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

Hello from MetalVPS.com a/k/a Tom Miller a/k/a @Not_Oles a/k/a the clueless™ guy!

Our wonderful antique server, Darkstar, might have a few accounts available.

Almost all Darkstar neighbors are and have been either computer professionals or diligent students. We especially are looking for new Darkstar neighbors who know more than @Not_Oles and who are willing to pay for the privilege of trying to teach a clueless™ guy. If you are up for this exceedingly difficult task, please send an email to the address on @Not_Oles' LET profile. Alternatively, a PM is okay too.

If you are a student or a beginning beginner, you're still definitely welcome! Free accounts sometimes are available for students and others unable to pay the $20.22 monthly fee. No payment is due from new neighbors until their accounts are fully set up and they are 100% satisfied. Payments via Paypal or Stripe.

Please keep in mind:

  • MetalVPS is White Hat!

  • Delivery might take awhile!

  • No warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. No service level agreement. Not for business use. Intended especially for computer learning and fun!

  • MetalVPS has no onboarding, no knowledge base, no customer management system, and no VPS install hypervisor.

  • Today, Darkstar is running the full "everything" version of Slackware64-current.

  • Slackware64-current requires reboots at least every week or ten days for kernel updates.

  • Darkstar accounts come with a command line prompt from which you can set up a GUI and whatever else you want.

  • Darkstar has additional toys already compiled and installed from /usr/local/src (and @Not_Oles would love for you to add more):

root@darkstar:~# ls /usr/local/src
expect/  gforth/  mtr/  netcat/  oksh/  qemu/  qemu-obj/  riscv-gnu-toolchain/  rlwrap/
root@darkstar:~# 
  • The riscv-gnu-toolchain was installed for MIT's Operating Systems course. Darkstar can run Xv6.

  • Darkstar has a separate 100G /altroot primary partition just begging for debootstrap and LinuxFromScratch.

  • Darkstar neighbors often (but not always) get full root access. iLO access can be arranged. Other MetalVPSians can see your account name, some or all of the processes you are running, and much other information, maybe even everything. So, please do not put confidential information on Darkstar.

  • Darkstar neighbors do their own backups . . . frequently, because . . . Darkstar is ephemeral!

  • Darkstar specs:

    -- Server: HP BL460c G6

    -- CPU: 2 x Xeon L5630 4-Core = 8 cores = 16 threads

    -- RAM: 48 GB DDR3 ECC

    -- Hard Drive: 2 x 400GB SAS SSD, Hardware RAID 1

    -- IP Addresses: IPv4/29, IPv6/64

    -- Connection: 1 GBit/s port

    -- Bandwidth: 10 TB

    -- Datacenter: Colocated with Level One Servers inside Carrier-1, Dallas, Texas, USA 🇺🇸

  • Please check MetalVPS.com or comment here if you need additional information!

Thanks very much!

«13

Comments

  • jbilohjbiloh Administrator, Veteran

    Good luck, @Not_Oles

    :)

  • RecDRecD Member

    $10 ?

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider
    edited April 2022

    Hi @RecD! It's about the money only if you really want an account and you really can't pay the requested fee. Best wishes and kindest regards! :)

  • riofredinandriofredinand Member
    edited April 2022

    Am I understanding correctly? Sharing accounts in one server?

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • @riofredinand said: Am I understanding correctly? Sharing accounts in one server?

    Yes, more like Pulsedmedia seedboxes or shell accounts of yore.

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    Yes, accounts are on one bare metal server; accounts are on the metal; and most neighbors have root privileges. Thanks for your question! Best wishes! :)

  • wow you paid for provider tag! nice

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    @cybertech said:
    wow you paid for provider tag! nice

    Thanks, but I didn't pay for the tag. It's a perk for my LEB Content Creator job. :)

  • FrankZFrankZ Veteran
    edited April 2022

    @Not_Oles said:

    @cybertech said:
    wow you paid for provider tag! nice

    Thanks, but I didn't pay for the tag. It's a perk for my LEB Content Creator job. :)

    I heard that @jbiloh was giving free provider tags to providers over 70 years old.
    Good to see some respect for the old folks, kudos jbiloh. /derail

  • Good luck with your project @Not_Oles!

    I like your spunk & attitude

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    @FrankZ said:

    @Not_Oles said:

    @cybertech said:
    wow you paid for provider tag! nice

    Thanks, but I didn't pay for the tag. It's a perk for my LEB Content Creator job. :)

    I heard that @jbiloh was giving free provider tags to providers over 70 years old.
    Good to see some respect for the old folks, kudos jbiloh. /derail

    ROTFL!

    Thanked by 1FrankZ
  • jbilohjbiloh Administrator, Veteran

    @Not_Oles said:

    @FrankZ said:

    @Not_Oles said:

    @cybertech said:
    wow you paid for provider tag! nice

    Thanks, but I didn't pay for the tag. It's a perk for my LEB Content Creator job. :)

    I heard that @jbiloh was giving free provider tags to providers over 70 years old.
    Good to see some respect for the old folks, kudos jbiloh. /derail

    ROTFL!

    Just wait until we bust out the old man tag ;).

  • Thanked

  • NekkiNekki Veteran

    @emperorsattack said:
    Thanked

    You didn’t, actually.

    @FAT32 @Jord @raindog308 another fucking bot, this time with less vocabulary tag the last.

    Thanked by 2Ganonk FAT32
  • risharderisharde Patron Provider, Veteran

    @Not_Oles said:
    Yes, accounts are on one bare metal server; accounts are on the metal; and most neighbors have root privileges. Thanks for your question! Best wishes! :)

    But wouldn't they be able to crash the system if they have root access? I understand the shells part but that part I don't particularly understand (are you basing that on trust or do you have some kind of failsafe implemented)?

    Reminds me of the 90s btw when she'll accounts were the craze and it was too expensive to own a vps or server

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • @risharde said:

    @Not_Oles said:
    Yes, accounts are on one bare metal server; accounts are on the metal; and most neighbors have root privileges. Thanks for your question! Best wishes! :)

    But wouldn't they be able to crash the system if they have root access? I understand the shells part but that part I don't particularly understand (are you basing that on trust or do you have some kind of failsafe implemented)?

    Reminds me of the 90s btw when she'll accounts were the craze and it was too expensive to own a vps or server

    Me being one of those who have sudo access to the server, I try to take extra care to the private keys to enter the server. I'm pretty sure there would be some kind of logging, etc. but I do believe this is a trust-based system. Plus I'm pretty sure no one's hosting any sensitive/production stuffs there, and use it mostly for testing or running stuffs that need the power of bare metal.

    IMO the worst thing that can happen is a fresh re-install which shouldn't impact at least for me.

    Thanked by 2Not_Oles FrankZ
  • mirocmiroc Member

    I am very sorry, but I am not sure why would anyone choose this shared root server thingy rather spending that 20 usd for a regular vps that is not shared by others with root access.

    Thanked by 3bulbasaur Not_Oles adly
  • NekkiNekki Veteran

    @miroc said:
    I am very sorry, but I am not sure why would anyone choose this shared root server thingy rather spending that 20 usd for a regular vps that is not shared by others with root access.

    Niche-within-a-niche sort of thing, I think.

  • @miroc said:
    I am very sorry, but I am not sure why would anyone choose this shared root server thingy rather spending that 20 usd for a regular vps that is not shared by others with root access.

    For having the power of bare metal.

    Thanked by 2yoursunny Not_Oles
  • @zafouhar said:
    For having the power of bare metal.

    Can't imagine there's much "power" in 12 year old CPUs. Can think of a few providers where you can get a whole dedi for around the $20/month mark.

  • mirocmiroc Member

    @zafouhar said:

    @miroc said:
    I am very sorry, but I am not sure why would anyone choose this shared root server thingy rather spending that 20 usd for a regular vps that is not shared by others with root access.

    For having the power of bare metal.

    not much power for a bare metal

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • NekkiNekki Veteran

    @LiliLabs said:

    @zafouhar said:
    For having the power of bare metal.

    Can't imagine there's much "power" in 12 year old CPUs. Can think of a few providers where you can get a whole dedi for around the $20/month mark.

    I don’t think that’s really the point.

    This is a nice little community project for like-minded folks. It’s clearly not intended to be mass-market or compete with anything else offered on LET. IMO shouldn’t even require a provider tag to be offered here as it’s so far outside the realm of anything else, but you just know that someone would be a bitch about it.

    It’s fun. It ain’t for me, but it’s much more interesting than the majority of offers on LET lately.

  • jbilohjbiloh Administrator, Veteran

    @LiliLabs said:

    @zafouhar said:
    For having the power of bare metal.

    Can't imagine there's much "power" in 12 year old CPUs. Can think of a few providers where you can get a whole dedi for around the $20/month mark.

    The 5630 xeon could see little work horses. Not a bad platform. Even today.

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • SPSP Member

    Thank you for clarifying, I was kind of wondering what the deal was. I assumed it was shared access to a metal server, but since you posted that it is a blade it could certainly have been a node as well. Not sure why that would have limited you to one OS, so the shared metal makes more sense.

    Do you own the enclosure, or are you just renting one of the blades?

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • zedzed Member

    not a situation im interested in but you might consider a tl;dr at top or bottom with specifics cuz your creative writing is awesome but im not parsing 12 paragraphs of prose trying to find price/resources ever again.

  • NekkiNekki Veteran

    @zed said:
    not a situation im interested in but you might consider a tl;dr at top or bottom with specifics cuz your creative writing is awesome but im not parsing 12 paragraphs of prose trying to find price/resources ever again.

    You win the coveted 'Banter of the day' award, congratulations.

    Thanked by 1Not_Oles
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    @risharde said:

    @Not_Oles said:
    Yes, accounts are on one bare metal server; accounts are on the metal; and most neighbors have root privileges. Thanks for your question! Best wishes! :)

    But wouldn't they be able to crash the system if they have root access? I understand the shells part but that part I don't particularly understand (are you basing that on trust or do you have some kind of failsafe implemented)?

    Reminds me of the 90s btw when she'll accounts were the craze and it was too expensive to own a vps or server

    Hi @risharde!

    Yes, it's a trust based system. We depend on our Neighbors!

    Why use bare metal? Here are a couple of examples:

    • There is a steadily decreasing but still significant speed penalty for virtualization. If you want to compile something, or accomplish lots of other compute intensive tasks, why not do so on the metal rather than inside KVM?

    • One of the Neighbors mentioned to me his White Hat research interest in ways to break into KVM machines. He pointed out to me that Darkstar's DDR3 ECC RAM is not susceptible to certain of the attacks which work against DDR4 RAM.

    ¡Saludos! 🚵

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    @sanvit said: IMO the worst [best] thing that can happen is a fresh re-install which shouldn't impact at least for me.

    Hi @sanvit! Thanks for your support of MetalVPS! Always lovely to see you! <3

    Thanked by 1sanvit
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    @miroc said:
    I am very sorry, but I am not sure why would anyone choose this shared root server thingy rather spending that 20 usd for a regular vps that is not shared by others with root access.

    Yeah, for sure MetalVPS is not for everyone.

    Perhaps consider that there might be someone with root access on the node which is hosting your VPS. There also might be other people with root access to neighboring VPSes. There might be someone around who wasn't invited.

    A lot of things can happen on nodes with 500 VPSes. Many of these might be difficult to see from the restricted view inside a single VPS. But, if you have root on the metal, you can see a lot of what's happening. Not everything, but a lot.

    I myself do use VPSes at other providers. Even though I could just spin up a Darkstar VPS and use it. So myself I am on your side of this divide much of the time.

    Darkstar is very fun for many kinds of stuff! <3

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    @LiliLabs said: Can't imagine there's much "power" in 12 year old CPUs.

    It's been awhile since I ran some tests. If I recall correctly, perhaps each Darkstar core might have about half the poop power of a core on the Hetzner AX101 which I had previously. Maybe the Darkstar cores are about the same as the cores on one of the free Oracle Ampere VMs. Well, Darkstar has 16 cores, so that's more than some machines, less than others.

    IIRC, it takes Darkstar about twenty minutes to compile qemu using 8 cores. It's been a few weeks since I last did that.

    Darkstar's drives are really fast! I compared compiling Qemu on a RAM based filesystem, and it didn't seem any faster than not using a RAM based file system. I am guessing, but I haven't checked, that Darkstar's hardware RAID might have a RAM cache? Dunno. . . . Haha, clueless™! :)

    Have a good day! :)

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