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MetalVPS August 2023 Offers: Bare Metal Server Share + Additional Bare Metal Servers!
MetalVPS August 2023 Offers: Bare Metal Server Share + Additional Bare Metal Servers!
Friendly greetings! 🌎🌍
Offer 1: Bare Metal Server Share
Californium Node Specifications
Californium is a radioactive metal with the symbol Cf and atomic number 98.
In a month or two, cf.metalvps.com might become an active MetalVPS shared server. Time will tell! 
- CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K
- RAM: 4x RAM 32768 MB DDR4 (Non-ECC)
- HDD: 2x SSD M.2 NVMe 1 TB
- Filesystem: 4 x 100 GB ext4 /altroot partitions; 1 X 1.5 TB Btrfs (RAID0)
- NIC: 1 Gbit - Intel I219-LM
- IP: 1 x IPv4, 1 x IPv6/64
- OS: Debian sid Fedora Rawhide
- Location: Hetzner FSN1 🇩🇪
You can:
- Work directly on the server node command line via ssh;
- Install your own KVM VPS with any OS
- using libvirt (Thanks @tang_cn!);
- or with bare qemu, please see also discussion with cpsd. (Thanks @cpsd!)
- Install pretty much anything else that's acceptable under the TOS shown below.
- All server resources are available.
Offer 2: Additional Bare Metal Servers With Fast Delivery
Hetzner has kindly given MetalVPS a second, additional primary Hetzner account so that MetalVPS customers and friends can independently initiate direct-to-Hetzner support tickets (including KVM console tickets). If you want a Hetzner server via MetalVPS, please feel free to ask.
Hetzner Server Auction servers seem usually to be delivered in about 4 minutes. Non-auction servers sometimes seem to take a little longer, but not much. Special thanks to Hetzner for great service and great pricing!
Warnings!
Clueless™ administrator with "limited technical skills. . . ." 😀 @Not_Oles frequently messes up! 😱
@Not_Oles is especially clueless™ about Debian Fedora. 🤗
Sometimes trusted MetalVPSians might or might not get sudo. 🙈🙉🙊
MetalVPS has no billing panel and no server control panel. It's all command line via ssh until you install the GUI that you want. 🆕
MetalVPS has no onboarding and no knowledge base. ♒︎
Account delivery might take awhile! 😴
Intended especially for computer learning and fun! 🤑
Frequent (almost daily) maintenance reboots are guaranteed! 🌺
Please make your own redundant, offsite backups! It's easy to download or sync or clone your backup to a safe place. Please also make sure that you actually can restore from your backups! Please think of your MetalVPS account as ephemeral! Your Node might blow up! 💥 At any random second @Not_Oles or maybe you might reinstall the Node! 🤦♂️
Other MetalVPSians can see your account name, some of the processes you are running, and much other information. So, please do not put confidential information on the server. 🤔
MetalVPS Neighbors are expected both to monitor and to contribute actively to this thread or to the companion Nodeseek and Low End Talk threads. 🍔
Terms of Service
- Be awesome!
- White Hat only!
- Not for business use!
- Intended for education and fun!
- 100% Open source software only!
- Hetzner TOS also applies!
Equipment Cost and Ownership Disclosure
- Rent paid to Hetzner for Californium is approximately €45.70 per month (without VAT).
Pricing
How much per month is fair for the amount of server resources that you want to use?
Giving away accounts for free is fun, but also seems to attract abuse. Still, MetalVPS might give free accounts to those in need. So, please don't hesitate to ask. My father died from lung cancer during my freshman year at college. Following my Dad's death our family was financially challenged for a while. So I learned how things can happen.
Payment
No payment is due on the shared server, Californium, until you are 100% satisfied.
Advance payment and a written contract probably will be requested for Additional Servers.
Payment methods are available in US$ via Zelle or via Paypal (and maybe also via Stripe).
How to Sign Up
Please post here in this thread. Please include your ed25519 ssh public key.
Please email ID scans to the address on @Not_Oles' profile.
Support
- To allow everyone to benefit from the discussion, please post here in this thread.
News from Not_Oles
The 128GB non-ECC RAM i9-9900K from the server auction is about half the price of the super great 64GB ECC RAM i9-13900K that MetalVPS recently was using. The i9-9900K cost is enough Low End that Californium can be within the budget regardless of whether anybody wants to pay for sharing it, or not. In round numbers, Hetzner's lowest price auction servers seem usually around €30 per month. At approximately €45, the i9-9900K costs only €15 more than Hetzner's lowest price auction servers. i9-9900s are not always available, and 128GB RAM i9-9900K's seem a little less available. I am a huge fan of Hetzner's great service and reliability, so, as a Low Ender, it's definitely worth it for me to pay attention to the auction and to wait patiently for the lowest price. If you don't want to wait, just a few € more will get great performance typically delivered in 4 minutes.
I hear that Fedora Rawhide leaves some of their kernels unstripped. It seemed like it would be fun to check that out, and using Fedora saves me compiling the kernels myself. Additionally, Rawhide kernels being close to upstream seems possibly a fun idea too. Of course, there might be a small performance penalty, but that's okay. I've now been running Rawhide for a couple of months on various servers. Rawhide seems to work okay, but I continue to hope for extra fun at any time!
I've been reading bits and pieces of several C and assembly language programming books. Among other aspects, I've been looking at GNU libc and at musl libc. The GNU C Library Reference Manual says "For historical reasons, the type of the C data structure that represents a stream is called FILE rather than 'stream'." Can you please clue me in on what those historical reasons might be and why FILE is capitalized when other types are not?
I tested various Linux server OS installs via leitbogioro's open source InstallNET.sh script. InstallNET.sh seems to work pretty well with various OSes and even deals with RAID configurations in addition to single drive setups. The script comes in handy when a provider doesn't offer the OS you want and doesn't have a convenient ISO install system.
Alpine Linux is really neat! We had a lot of fun last year on MetalVPS' Alpine Linux server! I definitely want an Alpine chroot or KVM or container running on Californium!
Btrfs seems now to be the default desktop file system for Fedora. I never used Btrfs before the last few months! But I have wanted to try Btrfs. Maybe, before too long, Btrfs will be the default on Alma and Rocky? The Btrfs partition currently installed for the present moment on Californium apparently takes advantage of Btrfs' RAID capabilities, and I believe also Btrfs' compression capabilities.
It would be super great to have a NetBSD VM running on Californium! OpenBSD and FreeBSD and Dragonfly too!
Xv6 also would be super great!
Maybe I can install Apache and set it up so every user Neighbor can serve a website from his home directory.
Right now Californium boots with "nomodeset", so there is no access to the integrated graphics. It's easy to enable the graphics. I have done it on other servers. One day I might enable the graphics on Californium.
I'm extremely fortunate to still be using Slackware64-current on my former antique server, Darkstar. Thanks to the person who bought her for great kindness and generosity!
More About MetalVPS!
MetalVPS is an indie project of @Not_Oles a/k/a Tom Miller a/k/a the clueless™ guy. 🥰
MetalVPS is not a project of Hetzner, Low End Spirit, Low End Talk, Low End Box, NodeSeek, or FreeVPS.org. 👨💻
