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Raspberry Pi Colocation

pi-colocation.com

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Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#71
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspberry Pis may be "green" in that they are cheap, but power efficient they aren't. They have barely any power management support, making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips.

> 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 an N4000, and includes 8GB RAM, a SATA SSD, and Gigabit ethernet, all running and accepting requests.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#72
post #7

Somewhat ironically, I'd guess that putting a server inside a wind turbine makes it less likely that you are utilising green energy. The power and comms connections to that location are there primarily to monitor the turbine, and they want that to work all the time, and especially when the blades aren't turning. So you don't go powering it with the wind farm itself. Installing the server anywhere else means there is…

One could power the equipment off the turbine when it's operating, and off an alternative supply otherwise. It seems a little silly to worry about where the specific electrons came from to power the equipment, though. If powering that equipment enables a wind turbine to produce more power than it would have without that equipment, then it seems like the existence of that equipment is "green" whether or not its power…

Wind turbines generate 690v three phase. It isn't stepped down until it gets to a substation near the consumer.

The power needed onsite (lights, control systems, energy to start the blades spinning, etc) usually comes from a natural gas generator or a direct feed from a fossil fuel plant if one is nearby. Due to circular dependencies, you can't power them off the energy they generate.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#73
post #45

I'm gonna ask the dumb/obvious question: Why would I want this? It's certainly not for the compute. Isn't the point of a Raspberry Pi controlling periphery on the edge? But that's not possible here? ??? It's not even needing ARM cores, as those are now cheaply offered by all the cloud computing companies. Is it just for some cheap fun? But if I'm going to host something on cheap amateur grade hardware, why would I no…

You can attach a big ass SSD to this and still pay just $6 a month. This is unique I think. I wonder how they would feel if you add your custom electronics to the Pi's GPIO connector.

I don't see how much use you would get out of a 2TB or 4TB SATA SSD attached to a raspberry pi if the network is locked at 10Mbps throughput.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything benefiting from a static IP address, such as running your own VPN, mail server, Bitcoin node, TOR node... the latter of which got me banned by my bank's security team because I was marked as "suspicious traffic" (wasn't even an exit node) - preventing me from using online banking. Talking to support proved fruitless, however the ban was lifted as soon as I changed my IP address.

I fix this by running a script on a cron job that updates dns records based on my current ip, using cloudfront to only allow known ips through my ufw rules. It doesn't work for 100% uptime, but I've never had an instance where visiting my domain failed. It may not work if you're running a tor node, depending on how cloudfront deals with them, but it does work for mostly-reliable dns resolution on a non-static, reside…

> alternative for people that want a static ip without renting vps/metal

How do you think Cloudfront works? Amazon is just selling you a bunch of VMs pre-configured as load balancers.

Not trying to be a jerk here, but the cloud has really caused otherwise smart people to lose a grasp on reality.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#75
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything benefiting from a static IP address, such as running your own VPN, mail server, Bitcoin node, TOR node... the latter of which got me banned by my bank's security team because I was marked as "suspicious traffic" (wasn't even an exit node) - preventing me from using online banking. Talking to support proved fruitless, however the ban was lifted as soon as I changed my IP address.

Note that the IP address is shared with other PIs and there are restrictions on which ports you can use: https://examesh.de/en/docs/colocation/accessing-the-pi/

I wonder why they wouldn't include direct ipv6 connectivity in addition to that proxy thing.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#76
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can attach a big ass SSD to this and still pay just $6 a month. This is unique I think. I wonder how they would feel if you add your custom electronics to the Pi's GPIO connector.

I don't see how much use you would get out of a 2TB or 4TB SATA SSD attached to a raspberry pi if the network is locked at 10Mbps throughput.

~10.5 days per TB over 10Mbps :)

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#77
post #27

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.

It isn't a lottery as much as an availability constraint.

First you have a limit of 1 stardust per datacenter per customer. Second, they only spin up a fixed number of new stardust servers per day.

It is a loss leader just like in any other business. They are losing money on one instance to get you in the door and you realize their other services are awesome.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#78
I totally understand all of the drawbacks here, I agree that it’s hard to think of an actual use case, and all that aside, there’s something aesthetically pleasing here in an “I’d read about this in a William Gibson novel” kind of way. “My compute fleet is distributed across a field of windmills in Europe” just _sounds_ cool.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#79

"12 pis in 1U" where 1U is defined as the height of a pi on its side plus shelf, rather than the definition of 1U in every other 19" rackmount data center

it seemed like they didn't quite understand the concept of rack units to me either
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