MetalVPS August 2023 Offers: Bare Metal Server Share + Additional Bare Metal Servers!
MetalVPS August 2023 Offers: Bare Metal Server Share + Additional Bare Metal Servers!
Friendly greetings! 🌎🌍
Offer 1: Bare Metal Server Share
Californium Node Specifications
Californium is a radioactive metal with the symbol Cf and atomic number 98.
In a month or two, cf.metalvps.com might become an active MetalVPS shared server. Time will tell! 
- CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K
- RAM: 4x RAM 32768 MB DDR4 (Non-ECC)
- HDD: 2x SSD M.2 NVMe 1 TB
- Filesystem: 4 x 100 GB ext4 /altroot partitions; 1 X 1.5 TB Btrfs (RAID0)
- NIC: 1 Gbit - Intel I219-LM
- IP: 1 x IPv4, 1 x IPv6/64
- OS: Debian sid Fedora Rawhide
- Location: Hetzner FSN1 🇩🇪
You can:
- Work directly on the server node command line via ssh;
- Install your own KVM VPS with any OS
- using libvirt (Thanks @tang_cn!);
- or with bare qemu, please see also discussion with cpsd. (Thanks @cpsd!)
- Install pretty much anything else that's acceptable under the TOS shown below.
- All server resources are available.
Offer 2: Additional Bare Metal Servers With Fast Delivery
Hetzner has kindly given MetalVPS a second, additional primary Hetzner account so that MetalVPS customers and friends can independently initiate direct-to-Hetzner support tickets (including KVM console tickets). If you want a Hetzner server via MetalVPS, please feel free to ask.
Hetzner Server Auction servers seem usually to be delivered in about 4 minutes. Non-auction servers sometimes seem to take a little longer, but not much. Special thanks to Hetzner for great service and great pricing!
Warnings!
Clueless™ administrator with "limited technical skills. . . ." 😀 @Not_Oles frequently messes up! 😱
@Not_Oles is especially clueless™ about Debian Fedora. 🤗
Sometimes trusted MetalVPSians might or might not get sudo. 🙈🙉🙊
MetalVPS has no billing panel and no server control panel. It's all command line via ssh until you install the GUI that you want. 🆕
MetalVPS has no onboarding and no knowledge base. ♒︎
Account delivery might take awhile! 😴
Intended especially for computer learning and fun! 🤑
Frequent (almost daily) maintenance reboots are guaranteed! 🌺
Please make your own redundant, offsite backups! It's easy to download or sync or clone your backup to a safe place. Please also make sure that you actually can restore from your backups! Please think of your MetalVPS account as ephemeral! Your Node might blow up! 💥 At any random second @Not_Oles or maybe you might reinstall the Node! 🤦♂️
Other MetalVPSians can see your account name, some of the processes you are running, and much other information. So, please do not put confidential information on the server. 🤔
MetalVPS Neighbors are expected both to monitor and to contribute actively to this thread or to the companion Nodeseek and Low End Talk threads. 🍔
Terms of Service
- Be awesome!
- White Hat only!
- Not for business use!
- Intended for education and fun!
- 100% open source software only!
- Hetzner TOS also applies!
Equipment Cost and Ownership Disclosure
- Rent paid to Hetzner for Californium is approximately €45.70 per month (without VAT).
Pricing
How much per month is fair for the amount of server resources that you want to use?
Giving away accounts for free is fun, but also seems to attract abuse. Still, MetalVPS might give free accounts to those in need. So, please don't hesitate to ask. My father died from lung cancer during my freshman year at college. Following my Dad's death our family was financially challenged for a while. So I learned how things can happen.
Payment
No payment is due on the shared server, Californium, until you are 100% satisfied.
Advance payment and a written contract probably will be requested for Additional Servers.
Payment methods are available in US$ via Zelle or via Paypal (and maybe also via Stripe).
How to Sign Up
Please post here in this thread. Please include your ed25519 ssh public key.
Please email ID scans to the address on @Not_Oles' profile.
Support
- To allow everyone to benefit from the discussion, please post here in this thread.
News from Not_Oles
The 128GB non-ECC RAM i9-9900K from the server auction is about half the price of the super great 64GB ECC RAM i9-13900K that MetalVPS recently was using. The i9-9900K cost is enough Low End that Californium can be within the budget regardless of whether anybody wants to pay for sharing it, or not. In round numbers, Hetzner's lowest price auction servers seem usually around €30 per month. At approximately €45, the i9-9900K costs only €15 more than Hetzner's lowest price auction servers. i9-9900s are not always available, and 128GB RAM i9-9900K's seem a little less available. I am a huge fan of Hetzner's great service and reliability, so, as a Low Ender, it's definitely worth it for me to pay attention to the auction and to wait patiently for the lowest price. If you don't want to wait, just a few € more will get great performance typically delivered in 4 minutes.
I hear that Fedora Rawhide leaves some of their kernels unstripped. It seemed like it would be fun to check that out, and using Fedora saves me compiling the kernels myself. Additionally, Rawhide kernels being close to upstream seems possibly a fun idea too. Of course, there might be a small performance penalty, but that's okay. I've now been running Rawhide for a couple of months on various servers. Rawhide seems to work okay, but I continue to hope for extra fun at any time!
I've been reading bits and pieces of several C and assembly language programming books. Among other aspects, I've been looking at GNU libc and at musl libc. The GNU C Library Reference Manual says "For historical reasons, the type of the C data structure that represents a stream is called FILE rather than 'stream'." Can you please clue me in on what those historical reasons might be and why FILE is capitalized when other types are not?
I tested various Linux server OS installs via leitbogioro's open source InstallNET.sh script. InstallNET.sh seems to work pretty well with various OSes and even deals with RAID configurations in addition to single drive setups. The script comes in handy when a provider doesn't offer the OS you want and doesn't have a convenient ISO install system.
Alpine Linux is really neat! We had a lot of fun last year on MetalVPS' Alpine Linux server! I definitely want an Alpine chroot or KVM or container running on Californium!
Btrfs seems now to be the default desktop file system for Fedora. I never used Btrfs before the last few months! But I have wanted to try Btrfs. Maybe, before too long, Btrfs will be the default on Alma and Rocky? The Btrfs partition currently installed for the present moment on Californium apparently takes advantage of Btrfs' RAID capabilities, and I believe also Btrfs' compression capabilities.
It would be super great to have a NetBSD VM running on Californium! OpenBSD and FreeBSD and Dragonfly too!
Xv6 also would be super great!
Maybe I can install Apache and set it up so every user Neighbor can serve a website from his home directory.
Right now Californium boots with "nomodeset", so there is no access to the integrated graphics. It's easy to enable the graphics. I have done it on other servers. One day I might enable the graphics on Californium.
I'm extremely fortunate to still be using Slackware64-current on my former antique server, Darkstar. Thanks to the person who bought her for great kindness and generosity!
More About MetalVPS!
MetalVPS is an indie project of @Not_Oles a/k/a Tom Miller a/k/a the clueless™ guy. 🥰
MetalVPS is not a project of Hetzner, Low End Spirit, Low End Talk, Low End Box, NodeSeek, or FreeVPS.org. 👨💻
What People Are Saying
- About MetalVPS
"MetalVPS . . . seems to have endless servers."
"@Not_Oles . . . thank you for providing machine for me to help me finish all the tests."
"I really enjoyed MetalVPS . . . I hope more people can learn together using MetalVPS."
"The permanent free shell account of MetalVPS is very fun!" ("MetalVPS的永久免费shell账号挺好玩的")
"MetalVPS used to be a high end provider, but it's becoming a sorority now."
"fun stuff indeed, appreciating the comfortable computing experience!"
"Nice trial and results! Very interesting "
"Wow pretty nice ! Congrats excellent options thanks for being a part of the community"
"the terms seemed exceptionally fair"
"Kernel Linux 5.11 is now in much better shape for AMD 
"
"Yes, please. I’ll take that."
"it's really quite dedicated. not all dedicated are the same."
"MetalVPS-AX101 has a reasonable price"
"really need a testing ground badly now especially with dedicated core"
"I've been using this one from him. Highly recommend! His support is really amazing!"
"Grab it while the hotel still has vacant rooms."
- About Not_Oles
"@Not_Oles . . . is doing all kinds of interesting work and sharing it with others"
"@Not_Oles is really a funfull and helpful grandpa!!"
"Really, you're the best person I've known on the internet."
"It was a pleasure for me to collaborate with Tom, he really knows what he's doing "
"Thanks again to @Not_Oles for valiant testing."
"you've brought a smile on my face countless times "
"Good luck with your new project! 
Happy to have you around here!"
"I always love how you come up with new ideas Good luck, mate!
"May you continue to learn and inspire others."
"he is the sweetest guy in LES .."
"resplendent as the Sonoran Sun"
"every time I visit les and see that profile picture, it brightens up my day."
"As for the new administrator, I nominate @Not_Oles."
"I would love to see @Not_Oles as a moderator or a bigger role."
"I would also support @Not_Oles as admin "
Thanks!
Tom gets a lot of help from the friendly MetalVPSians and from many other friends.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Comments
Hey man,
Been nice chatting lately. I usually don't get a chance to do that often.
Looks like you have been a busy boy lately. Good luck and if you need something give the Yeti a holler and I shall do my best to lend a hand.
Free Hosting at YetiNode | Cryptid Security | URL Shortener | LaunchVPS | ExtraVM | Host-C | In the Node, or Out of the Loop?
Agreed! Thank you!
Thank you again! Looking forward to more friendly conversation! Any time!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Do you own the magic ability that is BGP?
The all seeing eye sees everything...
That would be nice! 😻
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Right now there also is a second server, same specs, but only €43.70/month. That's the lowest Hetzner Auction price I've seen so far for this server. It's idling in the rescue system cuz I haven't done anything with it yet.
Friendly greetings!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Chairs lads, free chicken for everyone!
Ontario Dildo Inspector
💰
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Whaaagh so the free launch is over, feels Chinaman has lost a million
Ontario Dildo Inspector
You can thank the people who abuses free services for this. They are the reason why most of the internet now asks for money.
Websites have ads, I have ad-blocker.
Some of the internet asks for push-ups.
That also ensures you are real.
Accepting submissions for IPv6 less than /64 Hall of Incompetence.
AI can now create push-up videos. All your push-up is belong to us.
I will pay attention.
Update for anyone who is interested:
Surely this lovely server will blow up sometime, but, so far, Fedora rawhide seems to work equally well with Debian sid.
Every few days I see something like the example kernel update reboot shown below. Note the use of the new C++
dnf5.The usual auction offer price of these i9-9900K, 128 GB non-ECC RAM, 2 x 1 TB NVMe, 1 Gbps servers seems to have dropped another €1. I'm now regularly seeing them for €42.70.
The second server still sits as originally delivered, in the Hetzner Rescue System, because no operating system has been installed yet. Maybe, if nobody else wants to install something and use the second server, I could ask Hetzner about shutting it down temporarily to save electricity. If you want to install something on the second server, you're welcome aboard at MetalVPS.
Besides Debian, I've thought about installing Slackware64-current or Alpine on the second server. I even also thought about a few less commonly used OSes, such as Sabotage Linux.
Googling around about Sabotage led me to the comments on Lobste.rs (2021) concerning the Devs on Acid blog post celebrating Sabotage's 10th Anniversary.
Besides all the information about Sabotage's history as the first musl libc based Linux Distribution, the bottom of the Lobste.rs thread has a post with links to Youtube videos. One of these linked videos shows Bjarne Stroustrup talking up a 2016 CppCon presentation by Jason Turner.
What Turner showed at CppCon 2016 was writing C++ code and displaying side by side, next to the C++ code, both the resulting Intel architecture assembly output and also the 6502 architecture assembly output. Stroustrup said that he wouldn't be able to hand write assembly which was as efficient as the assembly written by the C++ compiler and optimizer. Additionally, there was brief discussion of how, in the case at hand, the assembly from C++ was more efficient than the assembly which could have been produced by C.
With C, it's at least sometimes possible to directly compare individual lines of C code with the corresponding assembly and machine language output. Here's a fun video from Ben Eater showing how a C program which prints a Fibonacci sequence. correlates to its own machine language output.
Some day, maybe I will understand a little more about how programming languages correlate with assembly language and machine code. If you're up on these topics, please come aboard at MetalVPS and help me learn a little more.
I'm also still looking for more understanding about the FILE type in C. I want to know exactly when FILE entered the C language, why FILE is capitalized, and why other types in C are not capitalized. My current best guess is that FILE entered C at the beginning, when C was born out of B. I Googled around and found lots of material about B. So, over the next few weeks, maybe I can take a look. If you know about or are interested in B and C, you're welcome aboard at MetalVPS.
Recently intel_gpu_tools and intel_gpu_top were mentioned in a discussion on HN about browser performance. One of the reasons I am playing with the i9-9900K is that maybe I can learn a little about graphics from the i9-9900K's integrated graphics processor. Google did show me a page about intel_graphics_tools, but I haven't yet allocated time to read it. If you know about or are interested in graphics and these graphics tools, you're welcome aboard at MetalVPS.
Would you be interested in any topic mentioned here if it were to be expanded into a LES Talk post? Is there another topic, not included here in this post, on which you would like to see a LES Talk post?
Haha, looks like I managed to time Californium's upgrades so as to get two today.
I was lazy and didn't do yesterday's upgrade until earlier today. Then today's upgrade became ready, so I ran it. 
Here it is, yet another successful upgrade!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Sorry, wrong thread. Admin please remove this
Sultan Muda - Amazon Store
Thanks for bouncing the MetalVPS thread!
Nah, hope it stays. I kinda like it.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Since August the €45.70 auction price of the i9-9900K with 128GB seems to have dropped by €5! I just found this listing at €40.70.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Maybe I should add that my €45.70 i9 is going away tomorrow unless I get another one. I presently have two E3 servers with 64 GB DDR4 ECC and 2 x NVMe. These seem dirt cheap at €26.70. Just found another one on the server auction.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
It's crazy how Hetzner keeps staying competitive. I was worried when they increased the price of their old boxes (e.g. i7-4700) but these new ones are killer deals and they just keep doing down.
That i9-9900K machine is €1/mo cheaper than the i7-8700 I currently have with Hetzner!
Hi @Erisa! Nice to see you!
It's interesting to speculate on possible reasons for the price decline!
Why might demand for Hetzner Auction Servers be lower?
I can imagine three reasons:
Nevertheless, Hetzner seems to be continuing strong on adding new, fast, and efficient servers at the high end of their product line. I guess Hetzner's strong new additions bode well for the future of their Server Auction and, thus, continued availability for Low Enders.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!