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See what's happening on your VPS's node! Launch your own VPS from your shell account!
Benefits
With MetalVPS you can:
see how many VPSes there are on your Node, how many other VPSes besides yours are running, and how your Node is performing,
verify, understand, and modify the entire software stack which runs your VPS,
conveniently run a lot of pre-installed software directly on the Node. For example, there are several graphical desktop systems including KDE and XFCE. Also, command line terminal hackers will find the OpenBSD ksh shell in addition to bash. For the curious, there's Chaitin's Lisp interpreter, MIT's Xv6 Operating System, TCL, and tons more. Plan 9 from Bell Labs is there via plan9port. Docker is installed. There is a 100 GB primary partition for debootstrap, LinuxFromScratch, etc. We would love for you to add to the pile!
You also can:
- study up on installing dedicated servers by accessing the HP iLO interface.
And, by far the best, you can:
- enjoy talking with and learning from your MetalVPS neighbors!
Disadvantages
Our wonderful piece of shite antique server, Darkstar, performs about half as fast single threaded as the four core VPS you can get for free from Oracle Cloud. Multithreaded, Darkstar's sixteen cores outperform the free VPS.
MetalVPS has no billing panel and no server control panel. It's all command line until you install a GUI or activate whatever pre-installed GUI you want. MetalVPS has no onboarding and no knowledge base. But many messages fly around, including PMs here on LET, email, and Signal App.
MetalVPS is ephemeral. It might blow up! We might reinstall the Node. Frequent reboots are required for updates. Long running services are discouraged.
No warranty. No service level agreement. Not for business use. For sure you need your own backups because MetalVPS doesn't do them for you.
Who
With a lot of help from the MetalVPS neighbors, MetalVPS is a project of @Not_Oles a/k/a Tom Miller a/k/a the clueless™ guy.
As of this writing, there are six MetalVPS neighbors of whom four have sudo privileges.
Most of the neighbors don't log in very often. @Not_Oles visits multiple times per day.
Where
Darkstar is happily colocated with @Ian_Dot_Tech of Level One Servers in Dallas, Texas USA.
Why
Why not? It's fun to play with and learn about servers, operating systems, and the internet.
Pricing
MetalVPS costs $20.22 per month. Free or lower cost accounts sometimes are possible. No payment is due until your account is set up and you are 100% satisfied. Payments available via Paypal and Stripe.
How it works
MetalVPS is White Hat!
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 VPSes can be made with Qemu KVM compiled directly out of git. LXC also is available.
Darkstar accounts can be delivered with a Debian sid VPS already set up and running. Delivery might take awhile!
Darkstar node 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 🇺🇸
More information
Please check MetalVPS.com or comment here if you need additional information!
Thanks very much!
Comments
Do any MetalVPS neighbors want to try Hetzner's Installimage dedicated server install program or do anything else on a Hetzner server? MetalVPS has available:
Hello!
A Hetzner AX41-NVMe has been ordered in Helsinki. Do any MetalVPS neighbors want to try it?
Friendly greetings from Sonora! ☀️
That looks very interesting!
An account on a dedicated server does not equate to a dedicated server.
Thus, this offer exceeds $10/month price ceiling for VPS.
Normally rules don’t apply here.
‘Jefe de Queso’ is ‘Head of Cheese’?
Thank you, gentlemen, for your comments! Best wishes!
I'm a little confused (but maybe it is just time for sleep... What is this? Why should I order this product?
All providers here are equal but some are more equal than others
At $20.22 per month, you might as well get your own dedicated server.
I did a quick search (the last two pages) and found one ($28/month) with:
(bonus: you get to have the whole server to yourself)
lol
Well yeah but DOWNSIDE of having own server is that you dont have 10 other people with root access on your machine making sure all your apps run uninterrupted.
I think it's more of a virtual hack lab membership than anything else. It's not a VPS or a dedicated server, and it's not as isolated as a shell account.
Hello @jackb! Thanks for your comment!
It is a virtual while hat hack lab! 😸
But it also is a VPS or a container or maybe more than one of each. Additionally, right now, it's three dedicated servers, not just one.
If you ask politely for root. 🙂
The basic purpose is for me to learn from awesome MetalVPS neighbors who want to pay for the privilege of teaching the clueless™ guy. Also to be available to beginners.
So far, it's been working great! At the moment, everything is very quiet. But that's good too!
If you're a beyond awesome white hat hacker, please sign up! Or if you're a beginner or somewhere in between. 🆗
Best wishes!
Tom
So, @yoursunny points out this offer is against the rules but it remains because…? 🤷♂️
Well it isn't isn't a dedicated server, no Provider tag, but 'moderator' may override that.
Not sure if it counts as a VPS (no isolation), maybe "shared hosting" where everybody has root, so against the rules for being more than $10/month.. Just a guess, if I am following the logic.
But @Not_Oles does have a (Patron) Provider tag
You're on to something. I'll take an awesome neighbour to pay me for the privilege of cooking a steak for me.
I think this is a reverse catfish and @Not_Oles is actually a super hot 24 year old European chick with 36DD's for any of this to make sense.
Because @Not_Oles once said if you can't pay the requested fee, you can get if free.
(ref. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3407736/#Comment_3407736 )
and
Edit: I wonder is there any user REALLY paid the monthly $20.22?
This sounds interesting just from how locked down the system has to be - what sort of eBPF hooks are in place to prevent kernel modifications that require AC cycling? Or overwriting the boot page of the system firmware - I don't think you can easily fix from the BMC ?
Yeah, AC cycling kernel modifications are tough to handle! It's not yet .well-known, but AC cycling kernel modifications now can be controlled by the "Lights Out" portion of the server's iLO. We're developing our new SuperRoot system. When the lights are completely extinguished, SuperRoot goes fishing using eBPF hooks. SuperRoot operates exclusively from the BMC, but under the exclusive control of eBee. SuperRoot catches and caches and then autoreverses both problematic kernel modifications and any evil firmware modifications injected by regular root. 😸
Something fun happened!
Darkstar's connection to the Rackspace mirror is way faster than to all the other mirrors. So I like to use the Rackspace mirror when I can, which is not often, because the Rackspace mirror usually lags behind. So, before updating, I have to check the state of the mirrors.
Last night, I mixed up two browser tabs, and thought the Rackspace mirror was up to date when it in fact was behind. So I inadvertently reverted Darkstar by using Rackspace's old ChangeLog.txt.
The remarkable thing was that Slackware handled the reversion flawlessly. And then handled flawlessly a combined two step update (from behind, back to where it used to be, then ahead to current -- all in one step).
As of now, reboot went okay. Darkstar is running 5.18.9 and back in step with Slackware64-current.
Best from Sonora!
Yes.