

Raspberry Pi Colocation - fekberg
https://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/

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jws
• 100mbit uplink

• 100GB/mo

• $0/ever†

† small charge to ship back Pi, offer will expire at an some time, no flying
ponies, rainbows may be included intermittently.

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shazow
I love this idea as a consumer. Just using it for an international VPN alone
would be super worth it.

The biggest factor is the effort of setting up the OS on my Raspberry Pi,
packaging it, and shipping it. If I could prepay say... $50-100 USD for a
fresh Pi, cable, pre-installed Arch on a SD card, and a small setup fee, I'd
be all over it. Especially since getting a hold of more Raspberry Pi's is such
a pain right now.

As others mentioned, it's unclear what the risk of this "unlimited for free!"
deal falling through, but I'd be willing to take that risk at the setup price
of this scale.

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chm
Setting up a RPi could not be easier. Arch is now available in hard-float,
which makes it worth using.

It's really just a matter of __sudo dd bs=1m if=Image.img of=/dev/rdiskX __.
Once you're done, configure your unit, update and install desired packages
(pacman). If you wish you can use __dd __again to create your own backup image
to save you the hassle of re-installing packages if you mess things up!

~~~
shazow
Indeed, I have a Pi and I've done it, but the hassle is nuking it with a clean
slate, packaging it up, shipping it.

Also ordering another Pi to replace the one I ship. :P

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
So just ship the new one instead.

~~~
shazow
Want to make some money? Do it for me.

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stephengillie
Or you could put a RasPi in a waterproof box, running off battery/solar/wall,
configured to connect to whatever wifi it can and SSH/SSL to an EC2 instance
or similar.

Boom, you can throw it anywhere in a neighborhood or apartment building and
access it from the cloud. You could leave one behind at each stop when
traveling to get a distributed network solution.

It's still a solution in search of a use case...though they could be used as
TOR exit nodes.

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debacle
Are there guides to setting up solar powered Pis?

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davewasthere
Well, a 60W/h battery would, in theory, power it for one day. I'd use
something like an old motorcycle batter. (12V 10Ah) Which might run for 2 days
continuous.

Then, charging, you'd want at a bare minimum, a 10Watt solar panel. That, at
an average of 6 hours usable sunlight each day, could possibly keep you
running. Get a few dark stormy days though, and you'd run out of juice I
think.

Could be fun. I'm tempted to co-host my Pi in Austria now that I'm looking at
using Arduinos for my project instead. (Order of magnitude less current drain
and instant start, which is awesome)

~~~
driverdan
You'd need a deep cycle battery. You'd kill a motorcycle battery pretty
quickly. I'd strongly recommend a sealed battery too.

~~~
jrockway
I recommend picking up one of these on eBay:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator)

I "know a guy" who will recharge it for you.

~~~
NegativeLatency
It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

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bockris
I don't know why you would want to do this but I upvoted just for the audacity
of such a service.

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thenomad
Ditto. I'm not sure what it's useful for, but it's very odd. And odd is good.

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simonlc
It could essentially be used as a very cheap vps. Maybe for running a bnc,
personal website, etc.

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kenkam
Looking at their VPS offerings, their 512MB package with 2 TB traffic costs
6.49 euros (~8.4 dollars) per month. Linode's 512MB offering is at 19.99
dollars. The only upside I can see so far with Linode is you get 20 GB of
storage instead of 5 GB with Edis. So what's the catch? Can anyone who is
using Edis VPS or otherwise share their experience with us?

~~~
kokey
Linode is Xen virtual machines and Edis is OpenVZ based containers.

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alexchamberlain
What does that mean in reality?

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kmike84
In practice this mean that Linode offers 512MB RES/RSS memory (+swap) and Edis
offers 512MB VIRT memory.

VIRT memory limiting is very a serious issue for some software. For example,
apache may use 10x VIRT memory because it is threads-based (most linux'es
reserve about 6-10M VIRT memory for the stack of each thread). VIRT memory is
usually considered "free to allocate" and software (JVM, soft that uses mmap
and so on) is written with this assumption. But this is not the case with
OpenVZ VPS servers. Just run "top" to get an idea about VIRT and RSS memory
usage of common programs.

It is exciting how this issue is not well-known. I even think that 91.318% of
"apache is memory hungry" things (they are still partially true, but..) came
from OpenVZ VPS benchmarks.

So in my opinion 20$ 512MB XEN is way better than 10$ 512MB OpenVZ because
512MB XEN is very different from 512MB OpenVZ.

P.S. my knowledge of OpenVZ may be outdated because I moved from OpenVZ VPS
servers a couple of years ago.

~~~
sedachv
> P.S. my knowledge of OpenVZ may be outdated because I moved from OpenVZ VPS
> servers a couple of years ago.

This is still true for OpenVZ. You can't really run JVM or SBCL on OpenVZ
VPSes for that reason.

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thechut
Can I provide a SD card as opposed to a USB stick? Still not sure why I would
want to do this, but I suppose it's better than the RPi just sitting in my
drawer...

~~~
topbanana
I think they are suggesting you boot from SD then use USB for long term
storage. People have expressed doubts over the longevity of SD cards for
sustained IO.

Edit: confirmed with them, USB is optional

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krobertson
This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen...

You send them your own Raspberry PI, at your expense, for many probably over
seas/out of country. You pay them nothing for their service. They're Yet
Another Hosting Company.

Wait until you overuse some resources, they're late paying their data center
bill (not sure how IP allocation work over there, but RIPE has their IP space,
not them), you Pi for some reason goes offline, or the company goes under.

There is no free lunch. Just wait, it'll be proven again.

~~~
adambyrtek
But where is the disaster part? You wouldn't use it to host anything serious,
right?

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krobertson
Guess it wasn't implied enough: not getting your stuff back.

Sure, you pay to get it back, but they even mention "probably does not cover
our costs" for some.

~~~
adambyrtek
Well, if losing a cheap device in a situation when a large multinational
hosting provider goes under qualifies as a "disaster" for you then sure.

~~~
krobertson
"large multinational hosting provider" - I'd never heard of them until this
post.

Going under isn't the only concern. A free service which most certainly costs
them (bandwidth, power, rackspace, IPs). Even if they're small devices, they
add up. And an offering that is losing money will get bumped for an offering
that is earning money.

I'm mainly just predicting the future HN post. Panda tears will flow. Just
think back to Joyent cutting out the old TextDrive lifetime hosting. People
more than likely got their money's worth out of it, but still a large amount
of drama.

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ChuckMcM
I find this to be a fascinating idea. They don't seem to limit the number of
machines, so I suppose you could send them a couple hundred.

One of the things I've discovered using a USB stick as a 'boot disk' on a
couple of embedded ARM systems is that they fry pretty quickly. I was running
a re-purposed Chumby with Ubuntu and a regular 'apt-get update/upgrade'
schedule. After about 3 months the USB stick was reporting it had 6GB of space
(down from 8), after 4 months when my system complained it was out of disk
space it was reporting a total of 4.6GB. Now I also did stuff like build
things with the armel GCC compiler so there was 'file churn' of the "write a
bunch of .o files, then link them" variety. But still, dead in 4 months wasn't
very impressive. My Pandaboard (same sort of deal) has been going 6 months now
on an 8GB SD card which is still reporting 8GB of total space available.

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fl3tch
Reminds me of the Mac Mini colocation, but more extreme. Just want to throw in
that I have a KVM with Edis and they are a solid hosting company in that price
range.

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trotsky
I admit I haven't looked very hard, but I have run into lots of conflicting
numbers. Does anyone know what the Pi draws off the wall in server context (ie
no GPU use) both at idle w/the phy on and running full bore both cpu & nic.

I really wish there was a market in budget targeted whitebox style home server
arm boards. Some sort of format standard ala mitx but with 1 or 2 core 1ghz+
socs, and mix and match one or two sodims, 1gbe, msata/mpcie, usb or sata and
i could envision a pretty popular ecosystem. Hell, spec it to fit a set of
3.5" disk mount holes, there's already tons of cheap cases for those
everywhere.

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chris_mahan
you can go to buyvm.net (happy customer for 2+years) and get a debian vm for
$15 per year. For the cost of the rasp, usb stick, powered usb, box and
shipping, you can have your vm paid for 4 years. Plus activation is near-
instant, you can reimage, pick a variety of images, and get 400 extra GB of
monthly traffic. Also, if you want to cancel, there's no shipping back fee.
Sometimes, they run a promo for $10 a year.

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tubelite
Very interesting if this catches on. It would be really cool if someone like
Linode hosts a Pi for you as a Real Private Server (TM). You have a nice Linux
box which you can ssh into. Combined with a free CDN like Cloudflare, you can
host mostly-static websites which will scale very nicely, on something the
size of a deck of cards.

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secure
Unable to order it (even after creating an account). When manually removing
the disabled="" attribute, the next page says "Oops, there's a problem...

out of stock We are currently out of stock on this item so orders for it have
been suspended until more stock is available. For furthur information, please
contact us. "

~~~
secure
It worked now (just tried again 30 minutes later).

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phil729
Are there any other colocation providers where we can do something similar,
but not just with a RPi, i.e., send them a small form factor, low-power
computer and a USB stick imaged with (or containing an image file of) an OS
that runs well under Xen that we know very well?

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sdfjkl
If you're shipping hardware, why would it need to run well under Xen?

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micheljansen
What a terrific idea! I notice they are using hydropower. I guess the Pi is
small enough to not bother a lot and uses little enough power to keep the
costs down. Clever way to promote your services :)

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topbanana
Seems you can't actually check out?

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topbanana
OK, if you create an account first it works!

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countessa
Ok, I've no actual need for this service - but I'm upvoting because it's cool!

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trafficlight
I want to see some photos of these things in their datacenter.

