Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
blog.railway.com
Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#2Using Claude to parse screen-scrapes of a server's boot status is certainly novel. I did not expect a mention of AI usage in an article like this.
With that said, I wonder why they used AI at all here. Could they not have keyed off certain keywords or other information present in a screen scrape, rather than rely on Claude to parse it?
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#3Out of interest, why not just PXE boot prebuilt images (buildroot/etc) that run from memory as your OS? That would save you the hassle of maintaining a stateful server, installing an OS, ensuring configuration is up to date, etc.
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#4Using Claude to parse screen-scrapes of a server's boot status is certainly novel. I did not expect a mention of AI usage in an article like this. With that said, I wonder why they used AI at all here. Could they not have keyed off certain keywords or other information present in a screen scrape, rather than rely on Claude to parse it?
The article says "...we can obtain a near real-time image of the server screen". Implying that what they have is an image file, not text. Getting keywords out of an image file would normally take an OCR step. A single API call to Claude does the trick without the extra tooling.
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#5> There are probably more effective methods of achieving the same, but it costs us less than a dollar to provision 50 servers using Claude to screen-scrape every minute during the install.
I think this is an important thing to remember/consider. I can't tell you how many personal projects I've stalled on worrying about costs "XYZ service/platform/API is expensive" without considering what "expensive" actually means.
Yes, they could have used OCR/image recognition-type software but what's easier than piping an image to an API and asking it?
LLMs frustrate me with their inconsistency/"fuzziness" (repeating instructions, putting them in all caps, saying "please" just rubs me the wrong way) but I know personally I have a bad habit of "That would be too expensive" or "How does it scale to X" when neither the cost nor the scale would ever be a real issue in the thing I'm writing.
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#6[deleted]
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#7Out of interest, why not just PXE boot prebuilt images (buildroot/etc) that run from memory as your OS? That would save you the hassle of maintaining a stateful server, installing an OS, ensuring configuration is up to date, etc.
Probably because it isn't memory efficient ? I am not sure , please take what I am saying is with a grain of salt. I may be wrong , I usually am.
But even if that's the case , couldn't they use something like vram if they are running out of memory of are we back to square one?
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#8Using Claude to parse screen-scrapes of a server's boot status is certainly novel. I did not expect a mention of AI usage in an article like this. With that said, I wonder why they used AI at all here. Could they not have keyed off certain keywords or other information present in a screen scrape, rather than rely on Claude to parse it?
I wonder how much of this is just to get a talking point about AI in the article (and I guess it works - we're talking about it).
If you literally need to just detect whether it's at the firmware splash screen or not, simply checking if enough pixels on the image are white would detect that splash screen just fine.
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#9Out of interest, why not just PXE boot prebuilt images (buildroot/etc) that run from memory as your OS? That would save you the hassle of maintaining a stateful server, installing an OS, ensuring configuration is up to date, etc.
Probably because it isn't memory efficient ? I am not sure , please take what I am saying is with a grain of salt. I may be wrong , I usually am. But even if that's the case , couldn't they use something like vram if they are running out of memory of are we back to square one?
I mean yes, you are sacrificing some RAM. But a typical Linux OS to run VMs/containers could fit in a couple gigs. For the amount of RAM these servers have, this is peanuts and would save a lot of headaches dealing with statefulness.
Re: Taming Servers for Fun and Profit
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because it isn't memory efficient ? I am not sure , please take what I am saying is with a grain of salt. I may be wrong , I usually am. But even if that's the case , couldn't they use something like vram if they are running out of memory of are we back to square one?
I mean yes, you are sacrificing some RAM. But a typical Linux OS to run VMs/containers could fit in a couple gigs. For the amount of RAM these servers have, this is peanuts and would save a lot of headaches dealing with statefulness.
Hmm seems really interesting and even simple!
How does this really work , can you please tell me the workflow , seems really simple and effective and i am just interested