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Raspberry Pi Colocation
- bockris 14y agoI don't know why you would want to do this but I upvoted just for the audacity of such a service.
- thenomad 14y agoDitto. I'm not sure what it's useful for, but it's very odd. And odd is good.
- simonlc 14y agoIt could essentially be used as a very cheap vps. Maybe for running a bnc, personal website, etc.
- leddt 14y agoMaybe useful to host a VPN in Austria for free ?
- duck 14y agoMaybe one small thing you could do is use it as a teaching tool for kids. Let them load up some sort of web service/site on it (that they helped create) and allow them to see it working locally. Then you would put it in a box and ship it half-way around the world, open the browser, and bam! I think that would be pretty cool and worth the shipping costs.
- tobyjsullivan 14y agoMaybe that's exactly why they are doing it (for free, no less). Just to see what people will do with such a potentialy disruptive service and technology. Maybe they have bigger ideas for RaspPi's future than I do.
- stephengillie 14y agoOr 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.
- geoffeg 14y agoI've wanted to do something like this for a while now (I was going to call it "sub rosa linux"). Little linux machines that would try to stay connected to any network they could attach to and be as undetectable as possible. While I like the idea from a geekery point of view, I'm not sure what the real, legal uses would be.
- debacle 14y agoAre there guides to setting up solar powered Pis?
- davewasthere 14y agoWell, 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 14y agoYou'd need a deep cycle battery. You'd kill a motorcycle battery pretty quickly. I'd strongly recommend a sealed battery too.
- fl3tch 14y agoReminds 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.
- jws 14y ago• 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.
- topbanana 14y agoSeems you can't actually check out?
- topbanana 14y agoOK, if you create an account first it works!
- kenkam 14y agoLooking 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?
- kaolinite 14y agoNot sure but Linode is fairly expensive compared to other VPS providers. That said, I have just rented a Linode VPS ($20/month) and am very happy with it. The interface for managing it is great and there are tonnes of great features. My old £5 per month VPS was good too but you do get what you pay for (unless you're using AWS).
- patrickod 14y agoI imagine they have a higher density of virtual machines per host meaning that you're competing / sharing physical resources with many more people.
- kokey 14y agoLinode is Xen virtual machines and Edis is OpenVZ based containers.
- secure 14y agoUnable 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 14y agoIt worked now (just tried again 30 minutes later).
- krobertson 14y agoThis 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 14y agoBut where is the disaster part? You wouldn't use it to host anything serious, right?
- krobertson 14y agoGuess 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 14y agoWell, 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 14y ago"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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- countessa 14y agoOk, I've no actual need for this service - but I'm upvoting because it's cool!
- thechut 14y agoCan 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...
- pepijndevos 14y agoI am wondering the same. Maybe an USB stick is faster/bigger? Actually, they probably run their own firmware/config/whatever on the SD or something, so they can manage stuff.
- topbanana 14y agoI 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
- shazow 14y agoI 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.
- chm 14y agoSetting 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 14y agoIndeed, 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 14y agoSo just ship the new one instead.
- shazow 14y agoWant to make some money? Do it for me.
- micheljansen 14y agoWhat 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 :)
- trotsky 14y agoI 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.
- trafficlight 14y agoI want to see some photos of these things in their datacenter.
- phil729 14y agoAre 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?
- sdfjkl 14y agoIf you're shipping hardware, why would it need to run well under Xen?
- chris_mahan 14y agoyou 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.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI 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.
- tubelite 14y agoVery 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.