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Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

dply.co

31–40 of 205 posts

Re: Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

#31
post #14

Is it possible to destroy a server before it's time is up? What if I made a server, but now want to try out a different one without waiting 2 hours.

There seems to be a "Rebuild" button that allows you to recreate the server from another base image.

Yeah, I didn't notice that you could change the OS when rebuilding a server. It should also let you edit the cloud-init script thing.

Re: Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

#35
Very nice project, a lot of times I wished there was something to start a server for a quick ssh/ping/traceroute/debug from outside my network.

Well done!

A few security aspects that I've noticed so far:

- calling the action(s) with an id that doesn't exist will show a pretty useful stacktrace, it should probably be disabled for production

- calling the action(s) with ids close to my server, I can do things to other people's servers (presumably, I didn't confirm the action for any of those, but I can at a minimum see what others have named their servers)

Not trying to be abusive, I just want to make sure we find the security bugs before the bad guys do, because I really like what you've built here.

Re: Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

#36

This comes at a time when, as a Linux newbie, I am curious about exploring the range of various Linux distros and GUIs out there. Would this be a nice tool to see the differences in the windowing interface of various Linux distros and learning more about navigating Linux through X windows, KDE, Gnome, etc, vs just using a command line?

You want https://www.virtualbox.org/

Re: Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

#38
Nice service! I could see this being really useful for web scraping or for offloading compilation. (Or any relatively short computation, really.)

I caught a bit of an awkward sentence on the FAQ though: "Unless specifically specified otherwise.."

Just "specified" will do :)

Re: Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

#39
post #20
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a free service we will pretty strictly enforce abuse reports and take action on them. We're using a few methods to profile users based on their github account/ssh key and other factors to block abusers once their identified. Dply servers are blocked from using SMTP ports to prevent spam. Yes. You can create another server once the first expires but automating this process is not allowed and therefore we do not pro…

What constitutes abuse? I imagine certain applications that would be fine with the server going up and down every 2 hours. That would effectively mean that they would have free service indefinitely. For example, a Tor bridge.

Shhhh, you're gonna ruin it for everybody else!

Re: Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

#40
Cool idea and service, however, I would think this is going to be used a lot for abuse and since you are targeting people who only need a server for a very short span of time I doubt many will continue and actually paying for the service.

But I hope you will succeed because there will probably come a time when I need something like this.

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