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Gridspot - Free Ubuntu instances...
...for now anyway. I've been using it all night and never had to give a credit card:
Pretty interesting idea.
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...for now anyway. I've been using it all night and never had to give a credit card:
Pretty interesting idea.
Comments
why it asking me to download something?
@DanielM: I think you want this: https://gridspot.com/compute/
Although looking at that I wouldn't say "Free"
No, that's the software that people use to create the system, you don't download it. Think SETI. You'll want to create an account, setup a key pair, and then create your bid. Within a few minutes, instances will show up and you can ssh in.
Again, it's free for you if you create an instance. There is no requirement to run their software and contribute to the network.
Hum, that is really interesting
M
Which 's virtualization tech they're using ? Maybe VirtualBox ? 0_0
not bad. But network is very slow
Maxium speed is 8000kbps. Choose your speed when create bid.
@subigo can you run geekbench for -me- us?
For a for-profit company? Yea, right.
So they have probably installed hidden software on peoples computers, and are using all that to run the VPSs?
Sounds like a rent-a-botnet.
That's kind of pointless, since each new instance is going to have different specs.
Yes, but the concept is cool. I was waiting for something like this for a long time.
When I will have some time (damn... when will that be :P) I will look into it, maybe there will be and OS project soon.
M
what can you do with this? no root access.
Do calculations that require much CPU usage.
You have root, NanoG6.
Largely useless though, no ports are forwarded.
root@inst-xV9zAwgaK-F-TayCQnDI0Q:~# lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440FX - 82441FX PMC [Natoma] (rev 02) 00:01.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371SB PIIX3 ISA [Natoma/Triton II] 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH VirtualBox Graphics Adapter 00:03.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 02) 00:04.0 System peripheral: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH VirtualBox Guest Service 00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 08) 00:0d.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
They use VirtualBox.
What @gsrdgrdghd said. Maybe I shouldn't have posted it on LET, because people are going to compare it to a regular VPS, when that's not what this is for at all. You're not going to create one instance and host a website on it... you're going to create thousands and use all of that processing power for multiple things.
When I will have some time (damn... when will that be :P) I will look into it, maybe there will be and OS project soon.
M
The concept has existed for a while. There used to be this other company that used to actually pay people to hand over their computer's spare resources, but that idea failed due to lack of demand (not supply).
It is not long till someone will do this as a p2p app and will use Tor or something or even be self-contained, some kind of a freenet in it's own pseudo-IP space built on top of everyone's connection. A free internet using public's internet infrastructure.
It is the next logical step, IMO.
That is not what I had in mind, rather a virtual net on top of the existing one opening a whole new range of opportunities. There will probably be different implementations but they will be routed somehow to talk to each other.
M
Freenet already does that.
Not really. Making the computers virtualized too and floating around using random resources with secure login and all is a whole different thing.
It wont be easy to do but it is possible and it will be done.
M
If people managed to do that, it'd be awesome given it has a decent speed and security.
It is theoretically possible. Perhaps it wont be at first a real cloud, i.e. resources polled together and the vms running "out there" completely, but it can be done, build a real crowdsource supercomputer and divide that in "VPS-es". It wont be fast, but good enough for hosting.
Sure there will be abuse and all, for a while will be much less secure, but it could allow different implementations and the best one will gather pace while the others fade away. Important is to route them together, i.e. make gateways between the grids.
M
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@Liam it wouldn't be worth it mining with CPUs I believe you have to use GPUs to make it very worth while.
The instances are ridiculously cheap though. I think I might try that.
@subigo: what's the output of ps -aux?
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=W90Lvbir
After researching it a bit more, it looks like most of these instances are running on systems that had gridspot.exe embedded in another install. Most people probably don't even know they are hosting a VM. I've seen everything from old Celerons to i7-2600s.
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4227014