101–110 of 149 posts
Pi co-lo for just four bucks a month sounded great until the fine print was revealed...
While I completely understand the allure of running on your own hardware, if you just want a cheap server to host a personal page or similar, you cannot beat Scaleway's Stardust VM instances. For less than 2 EUR a month you get 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 1 IPv4+IPv6 address, 10GB of storage and unlimited traffic. They claim up-to 100Mbps bandwidth but I regularly get much more than that. This sounds like a commercial but I…
https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ I am not a fan of the lottery approach and being told you're lucky to do business with them.
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> The Pentium G6400 outperforms a Pi4 4-5x, and has a 54W TDP (onboard GPU so at least part of that is for the GPU, so CPU-only workloads will be less.) The Ryzen 5600x is 65W and is twice as fast (at least) as the G6400... That's more energy efficient, sure. But it sets a lower boundary on the power draw much higher than a normal Pi. A Pi plus a single external HDD draws 12W at the socket, according to my measuremen…
That's exactly why you virtualize, so you don't just have a bunch of small Pis being mostly idle but less but more powerful machines running a lot of virtual istances that on their own are also mostly idle but you can put enough on to put enough load on the higher-powered machine to be worth it. In a data center they should have enough instances that virtualizing makes sense from the perspective of power efficiency.
A question to ExaMesh, in case someone from there happens to be reading: could you publically offer a guarantee and promise that not a single byte will be read off of (or written to) customers' SD cards or SSD drives before being installed, or after being uninstalled from your racks?
You can use dropbear to ssh into the Pi and provide the key during boot.
You can have the Pi connect to a remote system to retrieve the key.
Some methods are obviously not perfect, but it'll definitely make it more complicated than just "copy the card." Remote key retrieval would let you audit when the system was booted and so on.
There's a more complex purpose-built open source software package specifically for handling remote disk unlocks but I'm blanking on the name and my google searches aren't turning it up. I vaguely recall it had fairly high levels of paranoia in its design.
I know that co-location means “customer owned hardware”, but in this case, I think I’d way rather rent data center owned RPis and just pay them money rather than sending in hardware, having to cycle out hardware if/when it fails, etc. It also means the colo is running whatever random power supply I send them, which seems like something they’d want to avoid and means that there’s all the inefficiency of 12 supplies pe…
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> making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips What x86 chip can idle on 4W when including RAM and the mainboard? I have some very low power J1900 boards, but even they idle on ~10W.
It's not hard for x86 laptops to idle below 4W (see Surface https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Go-Pentium-6... , even Pro ones with screen on they idle well below 10W). With 10W just for the SoC you get into desktop or gaming laptop territory. I have a full x86 system that idles at 1.7W _at the wall_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639929 . This is an off-the-shelf ASUS PN40 mini-desktop, running…
A single stick of DDR1/2/3 ram uses more than that alone.
SATA SSDs are typically 0.5-1W idling.
The mobo chipset, figure at least a few watts
That doesn't even account for CPU idle power consumption.
Whatever you're using for power monitoring isn't accurate. Probably doesn't fully integrate, instead using sampling, and the sampling rate isn't high enough to show true power consumption from your PC's switching PSU.
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That's exactly why you virtualize, so you don't just have a bunch of small Pis being mostly idle but less but more powerful machines running a lot of virtual istances that on their own are also mostly idle but you can put enough on to put enough load on the higher-powered machine to be worth it. In a data center they should have enough instances that virtualizing makes sense from the perspective of power efficiency.
Virtualisation means you can get noisy (or nosy: see Rowhammer) neighbors. VMs are fine, but there are valid reasons to prefer bare metal for hosting critical applications.