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PSA: Your bare-metal server could be silently virtualized after deployment — here's how to check

2

Comments

  • suyadi92suyadi92 Member

    This is our OpenClaw instance hallucinating.
    Kindly close this thread.
    Reguards

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    Blyat, everyone check their OVH DEDI!
    I fkn knew it, the french did fuck us.

  • AlyxAlyx Member, Host Rep

    I hope this is meant to be an april fools joke

    Thanked by 2oloke ashish168527
  • zedzed Member

    We can't express outrage properly without names, come on lad.

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate
    edited April 2

    We got a few questions on whether the dedicated servers customers placed at South Pole Colocation would be virtualized.
    The answer is currently not.
    We still have colo space for a few million servers.

    However, if global warming continues and our data center starts to melt, we may be forced to consolidate.
    Even in that extreme case, you won’t notice any difference in systemd-detect-virt.
    We’ll employ advanced TDMA technology so that multiple servers of the same model is merged into fewer servers.
    You can still use your server normally, but any time it’s idle, our remote flappers would pass some of the hardware resources to other customers.

    If you want to slow down the final consolidation, please help with environmental initiatives to slow down global warming:

    • Stop buying VPS that you do not use.
    • Set your dedicated servers to ondemand CPU scheduler.
    • Drive less and take the train instead.
    • Pull out invasive species from your backyard.
    • Pick up plastic litter from your local watershed.
    • Sell off big oil stocks and invest in wind and solar.
  • rustelekomrustelekom Member, Patron Provider
    edited April 2

    @enzosama said:

    @rustelekom said:
    I doubt the feasibility of this solution, because it won't help the provider make more profit. There are too many complex manual operations just to save a few dollars. I think it's more like an operation against specific customers. It might have been done at the request of law enforcement agencies or something like that. But I have to say that even in this case, the work was done in a dirty way.

    @rustelekom Interesting perspective, but I'd push back on the "too complex for a few dollars" argument. If the provider runs blade chassis with 10-12 nodes each, the whole process can be scripted: scan utilization across nodes → flag low-usage machines on promo plans → dd the running block device to a virtual disk → install hypervisor → boot the copy as a VM. One script, applied to an entire chassis, frees up resources worth 2-3x the original revenue per node. It's not manual work per customer — it's a batch operation.

    Maybe, but this is a very strange way to minimize costs. Business, in general, is about making money out of thin air. So, call this implementation "improving the security of your data" or something else in the spirit of marketing, and you'll create a new niche in the market :) As far as I remember, these options were once called "hybrid" options. A bad implementation is always bad for any transaction.

    And consider: there was a thread on LET recently about a budget provider silently relocating VPS customers to a different datacenter without notice. If a provider has the operational capability and willingness to move machines between cities without telling customers, virtualizing them in place is a smaller step, not a bigger one.

    This is, of course, bad. At least the hoster should have informed the customers about the migration.

    As for law enforcement — no. The customer's data wasn't targeted. The VM was created with a generic template (standard vCPU/RAM allocation), not a forensic image. This was resource optimization, not surveillance.

    Understood.

    BTW. Around 2006-2008, we conducted similar experiments, of course, with the permission of our client. The main goal was to transfer a dedicated server to an OpenVZ host and create a single large virtual machine to simplify the process of updating the operating system, moving between hardware servers, and migrating from one data center to another for our client. Although it was a good idea in theory, OpenVZ had limited features and significantly reduced server performance, leading to the termination of the experiment. Maybe TS case is result of new experiments with new virtualization:)

  • enzosamaenzosama Member

    Something else worth doing — run ipmitool user list 1 on your server and check how many accounts exist. Most providers keep an operator-level account with their own password. That's enough to reboot your machine and access the serial console from home without you knowing. If you see one you didn't create, change the password.

    Thanked by 2tentor tux
  • TimboJonesTimboJones Member
    edited April 2

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    That's trivial. Vmware converter had that for free for ages. I don't know about kvm tools, but imagine ai could slap something together to automate it regardless.

    Edit: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE

    Thanked by 1rdes
  • ralfralf Member
    edited April 5

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    That's trivial. Vmware converter had that for free for ages. I don't know about kvm tools, but imagine ai could slap something together to automate it regardless.

    Edit: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE

    I particularly bolded live migrate.

    If these guys are managing to pull off a live migration such that their servers aren't even going down while switching from bare metal to VPS, then they've accomplished quite a feat.

    I can think of ways of dealing it with minimal downtime with root access (by adding sufficiently large swap, then suspend to swap and migrating before unsuspend), but not a live migration of a random dedi without a reboot which is what the OP claimed.

    Thanked by 1OpaqueRegistrant
  • zedzed Member

    tbh i just ignored the live-migrated part, the idea that there's some lowend provider out there pulling these shenanigans just tickled me endlessly.

  • enzosamaenzosama Member

    @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    That's trivial. Vmware converter had that for free for ages. I don't know about kvm tools, but imagine ai could slap something together to automate it regardless.

    Edit: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE

    I particularly bolded live migrate.

    If these guys are managing to pull off a live migration such that their servers aren't even going down while switching from bare metal to VPS, then they've accomplished quite a feat.

    I can think of ways of dealing it with minimal downtime with root access (by adding sufficiently large swap, then suspend to swap and migrating before unsuspend), but not a live migration of a random dedi without a reboot which is what the OP claimed.

    @ralf It wasn't a live migration — I said in the original post that "the customer's SSH sessions crashed when the physical machine went down for the switch." The machine went down, they copied the disk, installed a hypervisor, and booted the copy as a VM. Downtime was involved, just not announced.

  • zedzed Member

    @enzosama said: It wasn't a live migration

    You actually did say live-migrated, oops!

    Thanked by 1forest
  • PuDLeZPuDLeZ Member

    @enzosama What is this company you refuse to name reply to the support ticket? I sure hope the first thing you did was open a ticket since the resources paid for were drastically cut and changed to shared. Though it does say it was posted on April 1st so...

  • @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    That's trivial. Vmware converter had that for free for ages. I don't know about kvm tools, but imagine ai could slap something together to automate it regardless.

    Edit: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE

    I particularly bolded live migrate.

    If these guys are managing to pull off a live migration such that their servers aren't even going down while switching from bare metal to VPS, then they've accomplished quite a feat.

    I can think of ways of dealing it with minimal downtime with root access (by adding sufficiently large swap, then suspend to swap and migrating before unsuspend), but not a live migration of a random dedi without a reboot which is what the OP claimed.

    Yes, and VMWare converter does that, as do many Backup and restore apps like Veeam. It's just a matter of synchronizing them, shutting down the source and powering up the VM. It's generally 3-10 seconds of downtime, depending on switches and services. It generally goes unnoticed.

  • RubbenRubben Member

    attention dedicated server owner you might be getting CUCKED

    @Murv any thoughts on this

    Thanked by 1Murv
  • forestforest Member
    edited April 5

    @enzosama said: The OS was live-migrated into a VM, specs were cut (RAM halved, disk shrunk, CPU swapped to shared vCPUs)

    This obviously didn't happen. Live-migrating a running dedicated server?

    Here's what really happened:

    1. An MJJ got over-reliant on LLMs and doesn't actually understand computers
    2. Something weird happened and he started troubleshooting with the LLM
    3. It hallucinated and convinced him of a conspiracy

    Anyway, OP is posting really naive detection mechanisms for a well-known malicious technique called "bluepill". However, this is not something that would be done by a shitty low-end host but by an APT with an advanced rootkit, and all the techniques he described to detect it would be defeated by a few simple patches to QEMU and some configuration changes.

  • ralfralf Member

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    That's trivial. Vmware converter had that for free for ages. I don't know about kvm tools, but imagine ai could slap something together to automate it regardless.

    Edit: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE

    I particularly bolded live migrate.

    If these guys are managing to pull off a live migration such that their servers aren't even going down while switching from bare metal to VPS, then they've accomplished quite a feat.

    I can think of ways of dealing it with minimal downtime with root access (by adding sufficiently large swap, then suspend to swap and migrating before unsuspend), but not a live migration of a random dedi without a reboot which is what the OP claimed.

    Yes, and VMWare converter does that, as do many Backup and restore apps like Veeam. It's just a matter of synchronizing them, shutting down the source and powering up the VM. It's generally 3-10 seconds of downtime, depending on switches and services. It generally goes unnoticed.

    Except that if it was on a dedi to start with, you'd need root access to prepare the suspend to disk, as I said above. Otherwise, all you could do is shutdown and migrate. That is why the fact OP said it was a live migration was remarkable. Although he's now backtracked and said it wasn't.

    Again, I bolded live migration for a reason, and explained that reason multiple times.

  • forestforest Member

    @zed said:

    @enzosama said: It wasn't a live migration

    You actually did say live-migrated, oops!

    Not only that, but he his LLM strongly implied it as well by suggesting running the tests in a cron job every 5 minutes, which indicates that he his LLM believes that the running system could be migrated to a VM without being shut down or disrupted.

  • @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    That's trivial. Vmware converter had that for free for ages. I don't know about kvm tools, but imagine ai could slap something together to automate it regardless.

    Edit: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE

    I particularly bolded live migrate.

    If these guys are managing to pull off a live migration such that their servers aren't even going down while switching from bare metal to VPS, then they've accomplished quite a feat.

    I can think of ways of dealing it with minimal downtime with root access (by adding sufficiently large swap, then suspend to swap and migrating before unsuspend), but not a live migration of a random dedi without a reboot which is what the OP claimed.

    Yes, and VMWare converter does that, as do many Backup and restore apps like Veeam. It's just a matter of synchronizing them, shutting down the source and powering up the VM. It's generally 3-10 seconds of downtime, depending on switches and services. It generally goes unnoticed.

    Except that if it was on a dedi to start with, you'd need root access to prepare the suspend to disk, as I said above. Otherwise, all you could do is shutdown and migrate. That is why the fact OP said it was a live migration was remarkable. Although he's now backtracked and said it wasn't.

    Again, I bolded live migration for a reason, and explained that reason multiple times.

    And I replied with software that does what I quoted you asked for. You said one thing but implied something else (in-place hot migrate).

    But we all know OP is full of shit with secondhand information and speculation.

  • forestforest Member

    @enzosama Is the company that you claim did this on LET?

  • @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    That's trivial. Vmware converter had that for free for ages. I don't know about kvm tools, but imagine ai could slap something together to automate it regardless.

    Edit: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE

    I particularly bolded live migrate.

    If these guys are managing to pull off a live migration such that their servers aren't even going down while switching from bare metal to VPS, then they've accomplished quite a feat.

    I can think of ways of dealing it with minimal downtime with root access (by adding sufficiently large swap, then suspend to swap and migrating before unsuspend), but not a live migration of a random dedi without a reboot which is what the OP claimed.

    Yes, and VMWare converter does that, as do many Backup and restore apps like Veeam. It's just a matter of synchronizing them, shutting down the source and powering up the VM. It's generally 3-10 seconds of downtime, depending on switches and services. It generally goes unnoticed.

    Except that if it was on a dedi to start with, you'd need root access to prepare the suspend to disk, as I said above. Otherwise, all you could do is shutdown and migrate. That is why the fact OP said it was a live migration was remarkable. Although he's now backtracked and said it wasn't.

    Again, I bolded live migration for a reason, and explained that reason multiple times.

    They never said the provider didn't have root password, either. May have been autoinstalled from template instead of customer ISO. But also, with console access, they can boot to recovery and set root password. If the customer uses passwordless login with a key, they may not know if root was changed. It may never have been set!

    But my point again, I answered the specific statement about live migration in general, not this nonexistent live in-place mythical scenario.

  • ralfralf Member

    @TimboJones said:
    But my point again, I answered the specific statement about live migration in general, not this nonexistent live in-place mythical scenario.

    Maybe you need to read up on what LIVE migration means. And while you're at it, read the very first post in this thread, where the OP specifically says live migration.

  • NushairAlviNushairAlvi 🚩 Host Rep Tag Suspended

    You should definitely name the provider.

  • ThrowRaPestThrowRaPest Member, Patron Provider

    @ralf said:
    Can you ask the provider to do a write up of how to live migrate a dedi to a VM. Sounds like something that'd be useful! :D

    Yeah that’d actually be a solid guide live migrating dedi to VM isn’t trivial, would save a lot of people from trial-and-error headaches. That would be cool

  • @ralf said:

    @TimboJones said:
    But my point again, I answered the specific statement about live migration in general, not this nonexistent live in-place mythical scenario.

    Maybe you need to read up on what LIVE migration means. And while you're at it, read the very first post in this thread, where the OP specifically says live migration.

    Whoosh

  • It’s possible to do a live migration if the disks are moved to a proxmox hypervisor and you do disk pass through. However this would require a short downtime as the disks are physically moved from the bare metal server to a hypervisor, say 10 minutes. On power on the vm specs can be made identical to look like the bare metal server.

    The problem is how the physical disks would be copied to the storage pool on the hypervisor. Obviously you can run the VM with disk passthrough but it’s more efficient to copy it to the zfs backed storage pool. There might be some tool out there that can detect and keep track of the block device and block changes while silently cloning it to the zfs pool.

  • forestforest Member
    edited April 7

    @jackdoggett said:
    It’s possible to do a live migration if the disks are moved to a proxmox hypervisor and you do disk pass through. However this would require a short downtime as the disks are physically moved from the bare metal server to a hypervisor, say 10 minutes. On power on the vm specs can be made identical to look like the bare metal server.

    The problem is how the physical disks would be copied to the storage pool on the hypervisor. Obviously you can run the VM with disk passthrough but it’s more efficient to copy it to the zfs backed storage pool. There might be some tool out there that can detect and keep track of the block device and block changes while silently cloning it to the zfs pool.

    OP seems to believe there's a risk that it can be done at any time while the system is running such that you'd need to run the check at 5 minute intervals... Which is, of course, nonsense.

  • @jackdoggett said:
    It’s possible to do a live migration if the disks are moved to a proxmox hypervisor and you do disk pass through. However this would require a short downtime as the disks are physically moved from the bare metal server to a hypervisor, say 10 minutes. On power on the vm specs can be made identical to look like the bare metal server.

    The problem is how the physical disks would be copied to the storage pool on the hypervisor. Obviously you can run the VM with disk passthrough but it’s more efficient to copy it to the zfs backed storage pool. There might be some tool out there that can detect and keep track of the block device and block changes while silently cloning it to the zfs pool.

    That's not live migration, that's specifically cold migration.

  • @forest said:

    @jackdoggett said:
    It’s possible to do a live migration if the disks are moved to a proxmox hypervisor and you do disk pass through. However this would require a short downtime as the disks are physically moved from the bare metal server to a hypervisor, say 10 minutes. On power on the vm specs can be made identical to look like the bare metal server.

    The problem is how the physical disks would be copied to the storage pool on the hypervisor. Obviously you can run the VM with disk passthrough but it’s more efficient to copy it to the zfs backed storage pool. There might be some tool out there that can detect and keep track of the block device and block changes while silently cloning it to the zfs pool.

    OP seems to believe there's a risk that it can be done at any time while the system is running such that you'd need to run the check at 5 minute intervals... Which is, of course, nonsense.

    It's generally ok to do live migrations anytime for a static server. Active Directory and databases are always recommended for cold migration to prevent corruption and other database consistency reasons.

    Companies have been doing P2V live migration with VMWARE for ages. I did it 10 years ago at a previous job retiring Dell 2950 servers.

    But can we all agree OP is getting incorrect third-party information? I mean, when he said ssh crashed instead of "closed" or "disconnected", you knew what kind of accuracy you're dealing with. Not even factoring in the lack of provider naming.

  • enzosamaenzosama Member

    Fair point on the "live-migrated" wording, that was sloppy on my part. To be clear: the machine went down, disk was copied offline, hypervisor was installed, VM booted with the copy. Not a hot migration. The 5-minute cron isn't for detecting a live migration in progress, it's for catching the state after it's already happened and the VM is running. You reboot for maintenance, come back, everything looks normal, but you're in a VM now. That's the scenario.

    And no, this wasn't diagnosed by AI. The evidence was systemd journal boot records showing DMI changing from the real motherboard vendor to QEMU between consecutive boots, on the same OS installation. That's not something an LLM hallucinates, it's what journalctl prints.

    Anyway, the detection methods work regardless of whether you believe this specific case. I've said what I can say.

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