Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering • Hacker News Board

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#121

Post by Aeolun » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

programmer_dude wrote: post #24

ginko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your nick is programmer_dude and a dot for a decimal point confuses you?

Yes, it managed to confuse me. Here's how... 1. I did not notice the M1 was being offered on rent. I assumed it was for sale at the listed price. 2. Since 58.31 € is an unrealistic price for an M1 machine (and since this is a European site) I concluded the site must be using a comma instead of a dot. 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall. Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European…

> 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall

I don’t know where you live, but €5000 is not a realistic price for a mac mini in any place I’ve heard of.

Dots are only used in groups of 3 (unless India, as far as I’m aware).

Anyway, not saying you weren’t confused. But I think it’s fairly easy to figure out that there’s no way the dot in this situation is meant as a thousands seperator.

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#122

Post by pachico » Wed, Oct 20, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #88

pachico wrote: post #79

The rest of us not using Apple product watch with perplexity all things related to Apple hardware/licences, etc.

I mean if you're developing/testing for AIX you're gonna have to buy/find a vendor that licenses POWER8. I feel like we've forgotten that running software on commodity hardware is the exception rather than the rule for the bulk of CS history.

Definitely, I'm referring to the issues related to end consumer.

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#123

Post by programmer_dude » Wed, Oct 20, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

vineyardmike wrote: post #107

programmer_dude wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it managed to confuse me. Here's how... 1. I did not notice the M1 was being offered on rent. I assumed it was for sale at the listed price. 2. Since 58.31 € is an unrealistic price for an M1 machine (and since this is a European site) I concluded the site must be using a comma instead of a dot. 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall. Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European…

> 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall. Not really... the Mac Pro is famous for its high price, but this explicitly says mac mini which is almost exactly an order of magnitude less than 5831 € .

Hmm, sorry I wouldn't know about that either never purchased an Apple product in my life. Apple is basically a non-entity in India.

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#124

Post by gizdan » Wed, Oct 20, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

KarlKemp wrote: post #93

gizdan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware, but I thought iMessage had some hardware identifier that was necessary to use it. I guess my understanding was incorrect then!

The identifier is part of it, as I remember from my mackintosh days, but it cannot be all: MacOS works well as a multi-user system, including separate iMessage accounts for each user.

Aah, that's a good point.

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#125

Post by brezel31 » Wed, Oct 20, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

In you like a Mac mini for rent with a phantastic KVM and access the mini like it stands on your Desk, try http://oakhost.net

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#126

Post by lostmsu » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 5:42 AM UTC

Aea wrote: post #85

btian wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rent from Amazon for $1/hour It supports remote desktop and everything you would need

You can rent from Amazon for $25.99 a day and then for $1.083 an hour after your one day minumum. > Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement.

Maybe say you have to pay for at least 1 whole day every time.

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#127

Post by lostmsu » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 5:42 AM UTC

schiederme wrote: post #97

swebs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do those 24 hours need to be continuous?

Yes. It’s in the MacOS ToS.

But... why?

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#128

Post by anelson » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

We've been using Hetzner boxes to run our self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for a couple years now, except for Mac which we have run in MacStadium. This offering is much cheaper than MacStadium though; EUR 49 compare to USD 129.

I ordered one of these M1 Minis from Hetzner last night as soon as I saw the announcement. It was provisioned and ready this afternoon. Initial impression is good, it's a Big Sur M1 Mini. I paid extra (EUR 69/mo) to get two 1TB SSDs as well, since we often run up against the 256GB storage limitation.

Hetzner provide a dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6 /64, SSH access is via a password. Unlike MacStadium, VNC access didn't seem to be enabled initially, but some Googling around yielded the ASD command to turn that on. Our Hetzner firewall config blocks everything but port 22 anyway, so I tunneled VNC port 5900 through SSH and it worked fine.

The open question, which only time will answer, is network connectivity. MacStadium (or at least the Atlanta data center we use) seems to have pretty reliable connectivity, but our Hetzner runners sometimes fail with some transient network glitch while trying to download a random dependency now and then. Fortunately most of the tools we use will auto-retry, so even if we do have sporadic network connectivity glitches for the price it's well worth it.

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#129

Post by anelson » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

TimWolla wrote: post #115

e12e wrote: post #90

Curious about how they are "delivered" - ssh login with root access? Anyone know?

SSH by default according to Hetzner's customer forum [1]. [1] https://forum.hetzner.com/index.php?thread/28493/&postID=280...

The customer forum requires a login to access, and unfortunately is often in German.

The linked post says this:

"Danke für das Interesse an dem neuen Produkt!

Die Fragen zum Betriebssystem sollten sich durch die Veröffentlichung der Produktmatrix beantwortet haben. Es wird das aktuelle macOS Big Sur installiert.

Bei der Einrichtung und Zugangsmöglichkeiten haben wir uns nur für SSH entschieden. Nicht jeder Kunde möchte mit einem aktiven VNC-Zugang starten. Wie auch der eine oder andere beschrieben hat, ist die Einrichtung/Aktivierung nicht schwer. Gerne könnt ihr dazu auch einen Community-Artikel schreiben und weiteren Kunden helfen.

Welche Alternativen zu VNC würdet ihr Vorschlagen oder hättet ihr gerne, die wir uns mal anschauen sollten?"

I don't understand German, but I ordered one and received SSH login instructions, and was able to get VNC enabled and connected by tunneling port 5900 through the SSH connection.

Re: Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering

#130

Post by anelson » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

julienfr112 wrote: post #58

scaleway has also an M1 offer

FWIW, I've tried the Scaleway (Paris), MacStadium (Atlanta), and as of today also the Hetzner (Falkenstein, Germany) M1 offerings.

The Scaleway service had such awful latency on the VNC connection that I found it almost completely unusable. MacStadium and Hetzner are both better. That's particularly odd because I'm based in Kyiv, Ukraine, so I would have expected better latency to Paris than to Atlanta. It might have been a problem on my ISP's end, I didn't spend any time looking into it.

Besides that, the Hetzner offer is by far the cheapest, as is usually the case with Hetzner. If you don't mind having to do all configuration yourself, and you don't require a flashy whiz-bang UI for managing your provisioned resources, Hetzner is a great value.