11 ms·
Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected
- Liftyee 9mo agoThis looks quite similar to exe.dev which was on here a while ago - anyone know how it compares?
- indigodaddy 9mo agoPretty sure shellbox.dev has been around for at least 2-3 years though - EDIT nm they have a show HN from two days ago. I must be thinking of a similarly named/sounding service
- messh 9mo agoMaybe you mean keypub.sh? That is another project of mine with similar graphic design.
- indigodaddy 9mo agoActually I was thinking of the Devbox cloud thing, which I think they call Jetify Cloud now
- indigodaddy 9mo agoLove the site design btw. Super attractive on mobile.
- messh 9mo agoI think exe.dev is subscription. In Shellbox.dev you have funds and pay very little when not connected
- indigodaddy 9mo agoDo you do any resource scaling at all? What happens if my workload hammers the VM resources?
- Egor3f 9mo ago$36/mo for 2/4/50 VPS without public IP... Ok, I get the idea that the service is for non-regular use, but I think even $0.005 per hour ($3.6/mo) of suspended state is too expensive. The same config in Hetzner is just $4.09/mo for 24/7 working VPS with public IPv4 address
- messh 9mo agoHi, That is a good point actually. The suspended price has to be significantly lower than the alternative. I'll revise it. Still, there is the advantage of simplicity not having to deal with the web console etc. Some people may enjoy this
- nine_k 9mo agoThe interesting part here is that the box is stateful, unlike a Lambda. You return literally to the point where you left off.
- reactordev 9mo agoA VPS does the same thing for far cheaper.
- pjmlp 9mo agoLambdas can be stateful, for example Durable Functions on Azure, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable/durable-functions-overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/dura...
- einsteinx2 9mo agoYeah this is a cool idea but the pricing is way too high. For anything I would use this for I could just set up any VPS from any provider for cheaper and it’s stateful in the sense that it’s my own VPS and my files/applications/tmux sessions/whatever will be there the next time I SSH in. The UX here seems really nice, but after spending a couple minutes setting up the VPS, I essentially get the same UX (aka just ssh in and so stuff). I’d potentially be willing to pay some premium over a standard VPS, but certainly not a 10x premium…honestly probably not even 2x.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoThis is fascinating idea. I created an idea like this on top of firecracker and custom golang ssh client to build something like this for my own personal use case (the abstraction part of pricing and how to connect it seemed the more difficult part for me atleast) What stack does this use underneath? Good luck with launch, this idea is similar to railway in terms of pricing model. I discussed about it a few comments back and I think its an interesting idea and we are seeing alternatives within such pricing model Also are you using some cloud provider itself or building it yourself, I'd be interested in so many details to discover Have a nice day and looking forward to ya response! Good luck with your project!
- messh 9mo agoHi thanks for the interest! This is all written in python and the AsyncSSH package. Firecracker for VMs with memory mapped files for ram. Paddle for billing. Caddy as a reverse proxy for certificates. It works on top of very large bare metal instances. I'm thinking maybe open sourcing but it will take some more work on the code to make it publishable w/o embarrassing myself :)
- chwzr 9mo agoDo you do something similar to the modifications codesandbox has done to firecracker, regarding mmap ram? (They have multiple blogposts about it on their blog) Would love to chat about details there
- messh 9mo agoI have read about it, but currently using vanilla Firecracker w/o any memory optimizations. It is as simple as it gets for now
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoTHanks for your response! as well I am interested in which bare metal instances from which provider are you using if I may ask since I had a similar idea (as mentioned before) and I wanted to deploy it on hetzner but I was always worried that hetzner's policy might be too harsh for it even though they are one of the cheapest options out there Which server provider did you end up using? Thanks once again for your in depth response, these are the things I come to hackernews for! cheers and looking to ya response
- yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago> Note: The -O flag is required for OpenSSH 9.0+ to use legacy SCP protocol. Why isn't SFTP supported?
- messh 9mo agoWIP, this is still in MVP phase...
- mnsc 9mo agoIs it non-American all the way down?
- messh 9mo agoI was born in Argentina, so technically American, yes ;)
- messh 9mo agoIf it is successful then the next region would be in the US
- WhyNotHugo 9mo agoWeird fun fact (as an Argentinian who went to school in England for a few years): in English-speaking countries, America is not a continent in the same way as in Spanish. In English they have two continents: South America and North America. So the word "American" in English does not mean the same as "Americano" in Spanish. There's really no natural word in English to refer to someone from "El continente Americano", because no such continent exists in English. That's why they use the word "American" to refer to someone from USA exclusively.
- ekropotin 9mo agoFrankly, the model with the single America continent doesn’t make any sense, because south and north Americas are so different in both geographical and cultural/historical sense.
- singpolyma3 9mo agoContinents are about geology not culture
- Alupis 9mo agoWell, North and South America are two different tectonic plates[1]. [1] https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/tectonic-plates-earth https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/tectonic-plates-earth
- gvldev 9mo agoI've been trying to come up with a hypothetical use case for this. I can't use this as a server without keeping an active session right? I wonder if you could get around this by sshing into itself from inside the primary session. Is that an edge case you've considered?
- messh 9mo agoThis is a feature I want to implement: an option to keep boxes running while disconnected. Maybe with something like ssh shellbox.dev keepalive box1
- gvldev 9mo agoMaybe this and other future extended features could be configured via some host-accessible mounted conf.d? Otherwise if I forget to use that command on every login, I might just forget, logout, and go on thinking my server is still running.
- messh 9mo agoThe feature can be discussed here: https://github.com/skariel/shellbox.issues/issues/3 https://github.com/skariel/shellbox.issues/issues/3
- kelnos 9mo agoFor this use case, why wouldn't you just instead run a VPS on AWS or some cheaper platform?
- indigodaddy 9mo agoYou definitely should
- littlecranky67 9mo agoNot sure about the security sandbox, but given that paddle.com (your payment provider) takes 5% cut you could consider accepting lightning (bitcoin layer2) payments. QR code generation for lightning invoice is instantaneous just as payment, and will cost less than 0.1% fee (payer pays fee anyway). But the security sandbox should be solid, else it will be used for illegal stuff.
- znpy 9mo ago> you could consider accepting lightning (bitcoin layer2) payments. uh? i lost interest in bitcoin a few years ago, did bitcoin get actually usable for payments ?
- kelnos 9mo agoNot really. I mean, I guess the lightning stuff makes it settle/confirm faster than doing an on-chain transaction, but bitcoin as a store of value is still essentially gambling. So you'd want to immediately sell it and convert it to USD (or a stable coin, I guess), and presumably you're incurring fees at whatever exchange you're using. 5% for paddle does sound like it kinda sucks, but I feel like any lower fee you'd end up paying with bitcoin would get eaten up by complexity, annoyance, and currency conversion risk.
- littlecranky67 9mo agolightning also works for USDT, if you prefer that.
- nh2 9mo ago> 5% for paddle does sound like it kinda sucks Don't underestimate the benefit of it doing international VAT collection and payment. Especially for small amounts.
- solumunus 9mo agoBut why? Genuinely want to know what one might use this for. I can imagine it would be cool for a remote dev environment but the selling point would have to be that it’s far cheaper than the alternative.
- messh 9mo agoSimpler, easy to use, more enjoyable and fun are also valid reasons
- Kwpolska 9mo agoWhat’s difficult to use in Hetzner or DigitalOcean?
- hrimfaxi 9mo agoOne thing can be simpler than another without either of them being difficult.
- dwedge 9mo agoApart from the payment part, this could be used entirely from a machine without a GUI. You can do the same with others using Terraform or aws-cli but it requires setup first.
- sireat 9mo agoWhat about SSH requires GUI? I mean I SSH to my Hetzner Ubuntu fun box usually from Powershell or PuTTY, but sometimes I SSH from a Debian server without any GUI.
- dwedge 9mo ago> I SSH to my Hetzner Ubuntu fun box How did you provision your Hetzner Ubuntu fun box in the first place? That's the part that usually needs a GUI
- WhyNotHugo 9mo agoCool idea, but where's the "sign up" button? Trying to use any of the commands in the home page, I just see "hugo@shellbox.dev: Permission denied (publickey).". Clearly I have to register first, but there's no clue as to how.
- messh 9mo agoYou are missing an ssh key. Run this first: ssh-keygen -t ed25519
- newman314 9mo agoThere is no support for ed25519 host keys (confirmed using ssh-audit). Would be nice to have though. As an aside, you should use ssh-audit to get recommendations for what to disable as far as less than ideal options/configs go.
- zinodaur 9mo agoLove this idea! Started building a version of it a while ago, but gave up because my resume time was too slow My job has their own DCs, but inexplicably hosts devboxes in EC2 - an autosuspend feature for cost savings sounds awesome. Feature request: let me give you a Dropbox folder to persist/load my suspended vms from/to, that way i dont get charged for storage when not using it, and i can walk away whenever i want
- indigodaddy 9mo agoThe Dropbox idea sounds super interesting
- gigatexal 9mo agoALS no mention of GB’s of bandwidth provided.
- indigodaddy 9mo agoIf it's hetzner then it's probably not something you have to worry about unless you are talking like terabytes per day
- gildenFish 9mo agoLooks cool. You probably need a fyi or faq indicating that how the account system works.
- qudat 9mo agoThis is a very cool idea and I like the simplicity of the business model! SSH has a ton of great features and its ergonomics are excellent for terminal enthusiasts. Most of us want to ssh into our cloud compute anyway. As a founder of an ssh platform (https://pico.sh https://pico.sh) I just wanted to say welcome and good luck! Also If you ever want to chat about ssh feel free to reach out!
- zackify 9mo agoThere's been so many of these lately. I really need to share a blog post on doing this exact thing with a VPS, 2 commands to install and setup lxd. And then client side bash function to just make and connect via tmux and delete when you're done. Self hosting these services is too easy to do and you can have more control of your data and better specs.
- indigodaddy 9mo agoOn this same idea, I just started working on shelley-lxc: https://github.com/jgbrwn/shelley-lxc https://github.com/jgbrwn/shelley-lxc Work in progress/alpha, but the core functionality works as a proof of concept. Super exciting working on this kind of stuff.
- w7 9mo agoIt's funny to me as well. Being initially inspired by Yelp's dockersh I wrote a functional MVP of the same concept around 2 years ago. It used a custom Go sshd-proxy to spawn kata-container backed pods in kubernetes. I used it personally for a very brief period of time, and found it useful as a small timesaver for testing things. I wasn't comfortable with monetizing it though. After seeing a few of these pop up, I realize maybe I missed my chance to be early. As far as self-hosting goes, it looks like there are some FOSS projects now, eg https://containerssh.io/ https://containerssh.io/
- abbbi 9mo agoi looked at containerssh once and it was way to featureful for me. I came up with a simple ssh daemon that basically does spawn arbitary containers on ssh login and destroys on exit: https://github.com/abbbi/sshcont https://github.com/abbbi/sshcont
- theykk 9mo agoI made something similar last week using rust. It uses docker container with bunch of tool pre loaded. if anyone interested source code https://github.com/TheYkk/agentman https://github.com/TheYkk/agentman
- orliesaurus 9mo agois there a typo in the title? disconnected takes 2 n (sorry for the nitpick)
- bks 9mo agoWhat a brilliant billing and account interaction interface. I legitimately wanted to build something like this for a transactional SMS provider where it would all be provisioned, managed, configured on the CLI. Do you have any tips on how you built this out so elegantly?
- varenc 9mo agoWould love a SMS provider that was simple to use. Have used twilio in the past and every time I come back it, it feels like they've added yet another layer of abstraction to the process. But I suspect that spam and abuse means that becoming an SMS customer is going to have to be complex. Though just the ability to automate SMS msgs to a few pre-defined and verified numbers would be valuable and negate spam risk.
- vagab0nd 9mo agoI'm curious: what's the use case? Usually when I need a server I need it to stay on and have a public IP.
- behnamoh 9mo agoI wish runpod.io and others had this feature. I've forgotten to stop my pods a few times and only learnt about it when my balance became $0.
- krick 9mo agoAs others pointed out, this isn't a very strong offer, but I'm wondering, if it would be competitive (price/performance wise), does anyone have a use-case for this? I mean, I can name quite a few if it would offer me some hardware that my laptop I'm using to access it just doesn't have, like some A100-level GPUs and stuff, then it would be fantastic: login, do your job, forget about it until the next time you need it. But for anything else it feels like I'd just prefer something more… traditional? Like, DigitalOcean droplet, AWS instance, Linode VPS, you get the idea. At least a managed Docker container. Even if it's technically more expensive and less performant, we are talking like $5/mo, and you can pretty much always easily scale-up or buy additional storage volume, all these things. And it's all yours, for pretty much all practical intents and purposes. Does anyone have a legit use-case when it would be actually nicer to use this on-demand type of service? (Once more, unless we are talking some serious on-demand hardware.)
- ronsor 9mo agoFor these kinds of services, I think the main value would be UX improvements, such as offering an environment preconfigured with a certain set of tools (e.g. nmap, tmux, curl, etc.) and other defaults. SSH in, and don't deal with a web panel. They may also be valuable in a learning environment where you don't want student servers running 24/7. Other than those points, offering access to more powerful hardware is probably the best use-case.
- varenc 9mo agoWhat you've described sounds a bit like the very new https://exe.dev https://exe.dev service! Which I discovered on HN just weeks ago.
- andrewmcwatters 9mo ago[dead]
- SuperNinKenDo 9mo agoCool idea if you have a more specific niche requirement than it would initially appear, but genuinely nice to know this is available if such a use-case happens to cross my path.
- knorker 9mo agoWhat are the legalities of having a cash balance, withdrawable? (So not "credits" or something) Do you need a banking license, or partner with someone who has?
- rolymath 9mo agoI would use this with expensive GPU instances so I don't forget them running. Not so useful for cheap instances.
- messh 9mo agoExcellent point. This may be better proposition for more expensive instances
- raphinou 9mo agoI could imagine using this to access a beefier machine besides my main work computer. But indeed paying for stopped VM is difficult to sell. There was a suggestion to propose pre installed tools in different images which I find a good idea. Otherwise the workflow all by ssh is cool!
- yehat 9mo agoI have issue with that balance cut off at $5. How one spends the entire balance then?
- steeleduncan 9mo agoIt is odd, I would have thought $0 is the more obvious number there. It seems you can refund via a shell command though, so the money is not trapped
- gildenFish 9mo agoGiven they delete the boxes at $0, that may be cutting it close. That said they should add a flag that lets a user run down to the $0 if they want to live dangerously. They could also change it to $1 since that's their minimum balance required for refund.
- amelius 9mo agoUnrelated in many ways, but I have the reverse problem: When I suspend my Linux machine, my ssh connections are lost. Anyone know of a good solution for this? PS: Yes, I know about tmux/screen but I'd like a solution that keeps the connection, because I often forget to start a screen session. Also, I'd like my X11 applications to keep working.
- steeleduncan 9mo agoUse tmux. Ssh in and start a tmux session. If the connection breaks you can ssh back in and reconnect to the tmux session later. GNU Screen is another alternative
- amelius 9mo agoYes, thanks, but it does not work for me since X11 applications lose their connection too.
- hopw_roewur_ne 9mo agoMosh on server and client keeps the SSH connection going during suspension or network drops, etc. https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh
- amelius 9mo agoNice! But not a solution since it does not support X11 forwarding.
- ratdragon 9mo agoWDYM lost? do you roam? I used to have a job with simple OpenVPN to connect to the servers (via public IP, just routed through the VPN tunnel) and ssh connections stayed during my trip from office to home. Probably needs both sides not to be overly aggressive with keepalives and such. VPN just reconnected at home, but tun0 device and its local ip stayed the same, ssh connections also stayed. If you do not roam other side may do TCP keepalives or even ssh protocol keepalives and close the connection for you. Unless you can tune that, not much to do. Other solutions might be mosh (mobile shell; haven't tried) or just running screen or tmux on the other end and just resume where you left of after quick reconnect.
- exabrial 9mo agoThis is incredible. No "command line tools" to install. No absurd over-complicated web APIs.
- HPsquared 9mo agoI love the text-mode QR code.
- ValdikSS 9mo agoDisposable Root Servers: https://www.thc.org/segfault/ https://www.thc.org/segfault/ Segfault offers free unlimited Root Servers. A new server (inside a Virtual Machine) is created for every SSH connection. - Dedicated Root Server for every user. - Pre-installed tools on Kali-Linux. - Outgoing traffic is routed through NordVPN/CryptoStorm/Mullvad. - Reverse TCP/UDP port on a public IP. - Transparent TOR to connect to .onion addresses. - Log in via .onion, .gsocket or direct ssh (port 22 or 443). - Encrypted DNS traffic (DNS over HTTPS). - Pre-configured .onion web server. Just put your files in /onion. - Encrypted storage in /sec and /home with your password. - Encrypted storage is only accessible while you are logged in. Keys are wiped on log out. - Only the user can decrypt the data. We do not have the key. - No Logs. Different 'tilda' services: - https://tilde.town/ - https://tilde.club/ - https://tilde.fun/ - https://ctrl-c.club/ - https://tilde.green/ - https://tilde.guru/ OG shell access: - https://blinkenshell.org/ - https://freeshell.de/ - https://sdf.org/
- throwa356262 9mo agoI suspect this service will be abused by all kind of people and will have to shut down.
- inemesitaffia 9mo agoIt's been up for years
- xk3 9mo agoor quickly subsidized by three letter agencies
- derrida 9mo agoyeah that is what I was thinking "Ah how cute, it's the ops team from a state" lol but probably not - didn't look into / not interested but guessing it's an existing info sec consultancy behind it that do sometimes work those kinda places or banks etc.
- 8mo ago
- jahantech 9mo agoCool project but Hetzner can provide a cloud-vm for $5 (running) btw I am not from Hetzner
- cryptonector 9mo ago$0.005/hr while stopped is $43.8/year. That's... that's not bad! Worthwhile as a backup place to do work on open source, host an irssi.
- PufPufPuf 9mo agoGiven the price when stopped is comparable to price when running on cheaper VPS providers like Hetzner, I'd say that it isn't exactly good either