[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi Colocation ___________________________________________________________________ Raspberry Pi Colocation Author : 3xa Score : 157 points Date : 2021-11-06 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (pi-colocation.com) (TXT) w3m dump (pi-colocation.com) | ruined wrote: | ok but does anyone offer pi VMs that can boot my sdcard image | ushakov wrote: | there is a similiar, anonymous option from The Pirate Bay founder | | https://prq.se/?p=rpi | solarkraft wrote: | 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 not also just use my | home connection? Is this for _the experience_ and education? | | ... I really don 't see what it's good for (explanations | welcome). | [deleted] | wpietri wrote: | For many years I was part of a bandwidth cooperative. We had a | cabinet and a fat pipe and a bunch of sysadmins who wanted a | place to keep their stuff. Early on it was all 1U or 2U | systems. But later there was enough demand for Mac Minis that | we dedicated a shelf to them. | | It didn't make much sense from a professional syadmin's | perspective. But for a Mac user who already had their little | project on a Mini and wanted to get it off their home | bandwidth, it made sense to them in that it was one simple, | incremental change. I imagine the market here is similar. | xg15 wrote: | But at least in your case, people could put their own | machines in there. You wouldn't have rented out mac minis as | dedicated servers, would you? | | Edit: Ah, misread the article. Alright, then what you did was | indeed pretty similar. | wpietri wrote: | Yeah, ours was still a bit different, in that we just | provided a shelf where you could plug your gear in. But it | seems like the same principle. | Sebb767 wrote: | Next to the other arguments, the colocation is pretty cheap. In | Germany, you can calculate ~20ct per Wattmonth for electricity, | so ~1EUR of this would go to electricity alone. Hosting at home | also tends to come without static IP and non-symmetrical, | somewhat unstable connections (speaking from painful | experience). | | For this service you pay ~6EUR per month (assuming 50EUR for | the Pi and two years of runtime, no SSD) for a rather powerful | VM. Just as a comparison, at Linode, you get 1 shared CPU and | 1G of RAM for roughly the same price, compared to 4 core and | 4-8 gigs with the Pi. Storage is even more expensive, so if you | attach a large SSD, the calculation becomes even better (but | the 10Mbit might become a bottleneck quickly). | | [0] https://www.linode.com/products/shared/ | GekkePrutser wrote: | Scaleway's stardust is a lot cheaper though, and faster in | terms of connectivity. But they are limited to 2 per customer | ciex wrote: | 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. | walrus01 wrote: | 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. | tyingq wrote: | ~10.5 days per TB over 10Mbps :) | walrus01 wrote: | for the very patient rclone users | entropie wrote: | Depending on use that might be enough. I synced 1.4tb | over multiple days with like 30mbit/s. Who cares? | ed25519FUUU wrote: | An RPI4 w/ SSD for $6 is probably the best compute for the | buck right now in colo prices. This basically looks like a | BYO hardware setup where they can maximize economics due to | the RPI form factor being consistent. | | I'd like to see the same thing but with a Mac mini. | ghostly_s wrote: | There have been Mac Mini colos for ages. | glenneroo wrote: | 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. | SahAssar wrote: | They don't give you a dedicated public IP, and only 10Mbit | bandwidth. | hellojesus wrote: | 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, residential isp | connection. | | Not negating the project, just offering an alternative for | people that want a static ip without renting vps/metal and | without the isp static upcharge. | mike_d wrote: | > 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. | xg15 wrote: | 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/ | tyingq wrote: | I wonder why they wouldn't include direct ipv6 connectivity | in addition to that proxy thing. | YPPH wrote: | That's a really big caveat - thanks for flagging it. | | Looks like web hosting or a mail server is completely out | of the question. | ghostly_s wrote: | Why a Pi though? You're obviously not making use of any of | that expensive IO other than the eth...why not just offer a | "Pi-compatible " custom board* that's actually designed in a | sensible way for this use-case? Would be substantially | cheaper and more energy efficient. | | *Or really just shared hosting w/ containers running Raspbian | on standard server hardware with a nice onboarding workflow | for migrating from a real Pi would likely be sufficient for | most people's use-cases--if you're not using peripherals I | imagine you don't have any need for the real time OS | features? | vmception wrote: | That's such a polite way of saying this is the dumbest thing | you've ever seen | | Because that was my first reaction and thought it was a joke, | like real, but done out of jest | | Similar to how an engineer put a string concatenation function | on a networked compute instance, NPM and released it on docker | my123 wrote: | Small unit of dedicated hardware, without any other tenants on | that same host. | contravariant wrote: | I mean sure, but if you've already bough a raspberry pi then | you're most of the way there surely? | tata71 wrote: | Hugely underrated comment. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Security perhaps. VPS is no longer as secure with the rowhammer | and cache exploitation vulnerabilities. And if you only need a | tiny system, a raspberry pi is pretty ideal | mysterydip wrote: | "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 | aae42 wrote: | it seemed like they didn't quite understand the concept of rack | units to me either | zamadatix wrote: | From their rack diagram it looks to really be 2.67U + 1U 24 | port switch per 12. | jiripospisil wrote: | 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'm just really happy with the | service. | | https://gist.github.com/jiripospisil/b044b409d25dcf37d6e2c94... | xg15 wrote: | I think local hardware makes sense for LAN-only sites - e.g. a | company wiki, a media center or a file storage with web | interface. | | For anything that is supposed to be visible on the internet, | I'd always use a hosted server - if nothing else, because I | really don't want to open an ingress into my personal home | network, even if my ISP permitted that. | | For use-cases were you _have_ to handle certain incoming | requests even though your setup is mostly LAN-only otherwise | (webhooks, ACME, adding some dashboard you can access from your | phone...), services like PageKite[1] sound promising. | | [1] http://pagekite.net/ | gurchik wrote: | I would recommend Racknerd as well. Not affiliated with them | except a happy customer. I pay $36/yr for my 2 GB memory, 2 | vCPU, 50 GB SSD VPS that I run Nextcloud on. I also have a | $16/yr VPS with 1.5 GB memory and 30 GB SSD for K3s | GekkePrutser wrote: | Interesting. I hadn't heard of them. Their yearly prices are | excellent. | | Not unlimited data though. But I'll keep them on my list, | thanks | lizknope wrote: | You can find a lot of cheap VM instances at this site. I use | buyvm.net and I've been happy with them the last 5 years. | | https://lowendbox.com/ | ringworld wrote: | 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. | jiripospisil wrote: | I understand it more like a struggle to keep up it the demand | for these instances and this was their attempt to "gamify" | it. | randomluck040 wrote: | The lottery approach pissed me off so bad, I decided to leave | Scaleway altogether. They also aren't upfront about their | contingents. I wanted to try out an M1 instance and before | registering and putting my credit card info in, it seemed | like it'd be all fine, I just have to put in cc info. I did, | they told me there are no instances available. The fair way | would be to be upfront about it in my opinion. | mike_d wrote: | 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. | projektfu wrote: | How do you fit a raspberry pi edge-wise (56.5mm) into a rack unit | (44.5mm)? | mbalyuzi wrote: | This https://twitter.com/Merocle/status/1407684311344730117 is | quite a nice approach, albeit using a CM4. | kingcharles wrote: | Very carefully. | evan_ wrote: | It looks like they have a rack that's 1U tall, but they only | fill every few units to leave space for the pis. So in other | words, it's 3U... | whalesalad wrote: | This is _neat_ but from a scaling perspective it doesn't make | sense. A single server grade Xeon chip can expose the same | compute power as a cluster of these devices, with better | performance across the board (memory access, peripherals, etc) | | Just trying to grok a legit use case? | flatiron wrote: | Nervous people about spectre? Only thing I can think of besides | renting a VM. | KennyBlanken wrote: | The use case is greenwashing and separating people from their | money because everyone thinks Pis are just the bee's knees. | | 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...so in theory a 5600x is | twice as energy efficient as a Pi4 if fully loaded. Sure this | doesn't account for system fans and the motherboard, but they | don't use that much compared to the CPU. | | The whole point of virtualization is that most systems are idle | a lot of the time. At datacenter scale virtualization, you can | dramatically over-provision and shut down/sleep unnecessary | nodes, firing them up when you need to. You can get near 100% | utilization on your hardware, making the very most of every | watt that doesn't go to actually computing. | | Here they're going to have a zillion Pi4's, most of them | sitting idle, but still using a couple watts. They're not even | bothering to use any sort of shared power to improve PSU | efficiency. They're not even bothering to use Pi4 compute | modules. | | Now, the interesting bit is that now there's the Pi Zero | Wireless 2. It has nearly the compute power of the 3B+, but the | highest energy efficiency per watt of any Pi board so far... | selfhoster11 wrote: | > 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 measurements. A PC CPU draws 4-5x that, just by itself. | The other components on the motherboard need power too, even | if you use integrated graphics or no graphics at all. | | A PC only becomes more power-efficient if your load can't fit | in three or more Pis. For plenty of uses, more than two Pis | are an overkill. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | I like the idea in theory, but I can't entirely agree with the | "Green" designation. Putting 12 Raspberry Pis, 12 USB SSDs, 12 | switch ports, and cabling and power supplies for all of the above | adds up quickly. | | From a pure compute-per-watt perspective using typical cloud | workloads, I'd still expect a run of the mill shared cloud server | to be more efficient. It would also allow for more burst overhead | for individual workloads. | | This is an interesting option for people who need a specific | Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere. | piaste wrote: | > This is an interesting option for people who need a specific | Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere. | | What is that use case though? The page says that they only host | regular Pis and optionally a USB SSD. So they can't do anything | that a regular cloud server can't do - no custom hats, etc. | | I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now is | that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video streaming. | So this product could interest me, in theory - saves me from | having to migrate all my data & configuration to a cloud | server. But I would rather pay Hetzner a very similar amount of | money to get a VPS that's about as powerful as a Pi (probably | more) and still have the physical Pi here at home as a | fallback. | | Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed tasks for | which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient? | jo909 wrote: | > I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now | is that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video | streaming. | | "To ensure that every Pi at our decentralized locations | always has enough network throughput, the uplink and downlink | is fixed at 10 Mbps." | | Not sure about your use case, but for me that is way less | bandwidth than I have at home. | zamadatix wrote: | Edit: This is in response to the "fleet of Pi's" question, | obviously a Mac Mini is not going to be cheaper to rent than | a single Pi! The aforementioned VPS route is the better way | to go for that case. | | Scaleway will give you an 8 core 16GB RAM 256GB SSD M1 Mac | Mini for EUR0.1/h. It may not sound like much of an increase | from core count but it is ~10x faster for multicore which | means it probably comes out on top for perf/EUR, perf/Watt, | and total perf compared to a rack of Pi 4's for any such | distributed ARM use case. | | For pure traditional cloud a Graviton2 instance on AWS is | probably more green, albeit probably less cost efficient to | the user. | selectodude wrote: | That's EUR72/mo. Different price class there. | zamadatix wrote: | To be clear this isn't an alternative to hosting a single | Pi it was in response to the distributed case: | | > Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed | tasks for which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient? | | Assuming the task really requires ARM, is perfectly | scalable among multiple systems, doesn't require more | than 10mbps between the nodes, and doesn't require | dedicated control/scheduling nodes (i.e. best case for | the Pi's) a _fleet_ in multiples of 10 Pi 's per would be | $59.90 month each plus the up front cost of the Pi's, | power adapters, SSDs, and shipping. And even if you wrote | off the up front hardware as on hand it would still be | significantly less green to run. | AshamedCaptain wrote: | 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. | Sebb767 wrote: | > 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. | AshamedCaptain wrote: | 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. | erulabs wrote: | Hey this is sort of the mirror opposite of my startup (we try to | bring the internet to your home-pi, rather than ship your home-pi | to a datacenter!). Neat tho! I'm not entirely sure it's that | power efficient versus a carved up hypervisor tho... | alexatalktome wrote: | Oh my god you run KubeSail! Neat! | | I saw this and thought "can I use kube sail and host stuff in a | mini cloud?" | sokoloff wrote: | 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 per U | rather than one beefy +5.1V supply (with battery backing) feeding | the Pis via the GPIO pins. | joosters wrote: | Mythic Beasts do PI hosting with their own servers, and are a | very good company: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi | klyrs wrote: | I was hoping they'd have a DC power supply per rack, but their | FAQ makes it clear that this is not the case. Bit of a missed | opportunity there. Handling heterogeneous power supplies sounds | like a nightmare. | jagger27 wrote: | What a bummer. Something like an 80PLUS Platinum ATX PC PSU | could do around 40 amps on the 5V rails. Redundant server | PSUs seem like an obvious choice here. | [deleted] | HideousKojima wrote: | I've worked with a colo in the US that hosts Raspberry Pis and | they required that you have a PoE hat, so no sending in a power | supply. | ed25519FUUU wrote: | It looks like they have a custom built rack for the Pi, so | supplying a custom 5v rail probably wouldn't be hard at all | and would almost certainly be cheaper than large deployments | of PoE switches. | [deleted] | geerlingguy wrote: | It seems like either feeding 5v via custom power supply on GPIO | or requiring PoE HATs (though those are slightly less | efficient...) would be a better scalable option. | | One massive thing that seems to be missing here (unless I've | missed it) is any kind of remote ability to manage the server, | eg at a minimum remote power cycling, if the Pi locks up. It | would also be nice to get remote console but that would require | even more effort and potentially slight customization on the | Pis' boot config (to enable UART). | sokoloff wrote: | Agree, a central supply with a 3A MOSFET for control and a | PTC for basic protection would give a lot more functionality | and reduce customer downtime and smart-hands touches. | RL_Quine wrote: | At that point what you're describing has little resemblance | to a hosted RPI though, the complexity justifies just | making something custom that's better suited to the task | than shoe horning Raspberry Pi hardware into a rack. | danachow wrote: | Sorry but that's bullshit.. they're describing a basic | power switch (even simpler than a PoE hat) which is | nothing compared to the design complexity of an MCU board | with memory, peripherals and chip level power conversion. | prirun wrote: | They also sell PI Instances for $2.88/mo: | | https://examesh.de/en/instances/pi/ | Dylan16807 wrote: | Wait, renting is more than a dollar cheaper than colocating? | 1MachineElf wrote: | At least this offering eliminates the threat vector a of | compromised hypervisor. | ZiiS wrote: | Realy needs a secure boot option. | paulcole wrote: | How exactly is it exclusive? | anyfactor wrote: | I bet everyone who has a raspberry pi had this idea. Throwing a | raspberry pi with a solar panel and a sim card to a random place. | It could be for backup, vpn or to access some private network. | But having it be a rackmounted VM in a fixed location doesn't | sound that fun to me. | aofeisheng wrote: | > What is the traffic limit? | | > It's 2021. We don't have a traffic limit for a Raspberry Pi. | | > What is the data transfer rate? | | > The data rate is synchronously set to 10 Mbit/s per Raspberry. | | It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough. | [deleted] | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | _> It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough._ | | I mean, not to disagree here, but that's pretty much the | average internet speed in some third world countries, like | Austria for example. :) | tiagod wrote: | So, a single person in such country would be enough to | saturate the server... | jagger27 wrote: | I can't imagine having any hardware colocated without proper out- | of-band KVM access. Who is going to drive out to the wind turbine | and flash a new disk image to my Pi? | | 10Mbps is also excruciatingly slow. I was ready to see a 100Mbps | cap. | bennyp101 wrote: | From https://examesh.de/en/docs/colocation/accessing-the-pi/ : | | "Instead of using a public IP the Pi is accessed by combining a | public hostname with dedicated TCP ports. The hostname points to | one of the ExaMesh gateways and is assigned to the colocation | along with the available TCP ports in the booking process." | | So maybe useful for an extra node for redundency, but maybe not | as useful as having an actual address. Perhaps an extra encrypted | Syncthing node or something | buildbuildbuild wrote: | I think they'll need to iterate a bit to find product market fit. | The 10mbit bandwidth limit, calling it "Decentralized", no public | IP downsides are off-putting even at this price. | holri wrote: | In Vienna/Austria there is a rpi or similar housing with a real | ipv4 address: | | https://www.easyserver.at/serverhousing | RL_Quine wrote: | The description of "decentralized" seems to be a little weak | here. | joosters wrote: | 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 a chance that | its power is being generated by that wind turbine! | sgtnoodle wrote: | 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 came from dirtier sources. | mike_d wrote: | 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. | mr_sturd wrote: | EDIS offered a colo service for free, back in the early RPi days. | | I had two gen 1.5 machines hosted with them; one with OwnCloud, | and another hosted my music via SFTP. | bullen wrote: | gen 1.5? Are they still running those for free? | | I had "free" colocations in Sweden and Holland that then turned | not free then got cancelled altogether. | | Pi clusters are best for home hosting on your own fiber. | | Also those Pi 4 need heatsinks like so: | http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png | mr_sturd wrote: | They were a revision of the first gen Raspberry Pi. A bit | more stable and seemed to not corrupt the root filesystem | after a few hours, which the initial one seemed to invariably | do for me. | | They're not offering it any more, no. | | I moved to self-hosting after that. Even got a static IP | address for it. | smarx007 wrote: | > To ensure that every Pi at our decentralized locations always | has enough network throughput, the uplink and downlink is fixed | at 10 Mbps. | | Ok, thx, I have a 100/10 Mpbs link at home. The only reason I'd | place my Pi in a colo is to get 100/100 Mpbs or 1 Gbit network. | | Edit: https://contabo.com/en/vps/ (200Mpbs in the cheapest plan) | or https://www.seedhost.eu/ (1/10G) is not too far from the | EUR6,- price mark and I don't have to own the hardware. | roughly wrote: | 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. | sgtnoodle wrote: | I wonder how they mirror the raspberry pis without destroying | them. | | (Look at their cad drawing of 12 pis in a rack.) | walrus01 wrote: | I think I'd rather have a decently specced KVM VM on a x86-64 | hypervisor somewhere, I can run mainline debian on, for $6/mo | than a raspberry pi. For that money if you look you can get | something with 2 pseudo cores, 2 gigs of ram, and probably 40GB | of storage. | | At least I can have more confidence that the storage won't | spontaneously fail, and network throughput greater than 10 Mbps. | | This seems like a cool _idea_ and all and it 's certainly cheap | for hobby projects. But I wonder how viable it really is as a | business model. Doing the math on person-hour costs if just one | pi requires 15 minutes of support/human attention from a person | at the ISP, once, you're losing money on that customer forever. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-06 23:00 UTC)