What Happens With Free VPSes If Beautiful Crunchy Marries Handsome Ryzen?
Friendly greetings!
As you may know, thanks to @crunchbits, for almost a year MetalVPS has given away free VPSes on beautiful Crunchy a donated Crunchbits server.
Today, we are rocketing on down towards November 8, the date when Crunchy needs to be renewed.
A whisper recently heard suggested that, although nothing is cemented, Crunchy perhaps, perhaps not, possibly, possibly not, just maybe, or maybe not, but at least conceivably . . . could be upgraded to Ryzen. Woo!
Another idea, if Crunchy continues or if Crunchy is upgraded, might be to increase slightly the number of free VPS Neighbors. Handling a slightly increased number of Neighbors might be facilitated by adding FOSSBilling to keep everything better organized and to add new Neighbors via a web interface.
FOSSbilling seems to be coming along quite nicely! But, so far, FOSSBilling doesn't have an integrated back end to provision VPSes. Nevertheless, using BashVM for almost a year suggests that something as simple and elegant as BashVM might work well with FOSSBilling. Maybe something like BashVM could be integrated into FOSSBilling?
Thus the idea emerges:
a possibly Ryzenified Crunchy,
with slightly more Neighbors,
FOSSBilling, and
BashVM, or something similar, either alongside FOSSBilling or integrated into FOSSBilling.
This idea might give us a graphical web interface that's open source and which takes care of adding new Neighbors and provisioning their VPSes.
What do you guys think? Does anybody want to help make it happen?
Best!
Tom
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Comments
Billing software: needs API access to the hypervisor for automated deployment.
BashVM: provides human interface, but not API.
Incompatible philosophy!
HostBrr aff best VPS; VirmAche aff worst VPS.
Unable to push-up due to shoulder injury 😣
^^^ This. You're going to need to change the VM management to something that provides a API.
If you are wanting no cost then maybe Proxmox + Paymenter, or something similar? If you're looking for volunteers then I'm happy to help out.
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Depends how hacky of a solution is tolerable really. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility to create a small API script on the hypervisor that translates API calls to BashVM commands (not too hacky), or have the FOSSBilling module connect via SSH and execute the commands (extremely hacky).
This sounds like what I am imagining. If I understand right, at least some bashvm commands call virsh, which is libvirt, so I am guessing there already is a full API within libvirt. They call libvirt "the Virtualization API" so it sounds like there might be an API there.
Here is bashvm calling virsh:
Here is a link to libvirt's description of "the main principles and architecture choices behind the definition of the libvirt API:"
https://libvirt.org/api.html
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Another quite different alternative might be something like terminal.shop.
Anybody else here interested in something like terminal.shop?
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Nice to meet you! Thanks for volunteering! May I please ask, what do you propose as the next step? Thanks again!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
I can look at creating a custom server module for FOSSBilling that will be able to integrate with a custom API script which will interface with either BashVM or virsh.
Will each VM receive a IPv4 address, or will it be via a NAT?
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@SharedGrid Maybe it might be easier just to go directly from FOSSBilling to the libvirt API? It seems that virsh is a tool to use the libvirt API from the command line and that BashVM is a tool to simplify virsh syntax.
Some people definitely will want an IPv4 address for each VM, and others will want NAT. Of course, everyone will want IPv6. So FOSSBilling ought to be able to do all three. If it's beginning to seem complicated, maybe start with NAT?
Thanks for considering! Best wishes!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
It appears that MetalVPS is in the market for an ASN.
Our ASN, AS200690, along with 200690.xyz domain, might be up for sale.
It could be a "domain auction" of this otherwise worthless domain, in which you get the ASN if your bid exceeds a certain amount (preliminary threshold would be 45 push-ups or equivalent).
The ASN would still be in our name, but you can pay Cloudie to change it; the renaming fee would be similar to obtaining a new ASN, but you get this well-rounded number.
We can also offer a rental.
You pay half of the RIPE tax ($75/year, half is $37.50) and get half of the address space (/41).
The ASN would still be in our name and in our RIPE account.
We provide management service such as creating RIPE objects and configuring Pathvector on the servers; we can also do SONiC and Cisco configuration, but will not touch MikroTik garbage.
If abuse occurs and we go to jail because of that, you agree to bail us out.
HostBrr aff best VPS; VirmAche aff worst VPS.
Unable to push-up due to shoulder injury 😣
Deal Breaker!
Free Hosting at YetiNode | Cryptid Security | URL Shortener | LaunchVPS | ExtraVM | Host-C | In the Node, or Out of the Loop?
@yoursunny
It would be great to partner with and learn a little from you or from someone like you, with amazing skills!
How should we proceed? [Edit to add: Please consider the idea in the next post, below.]
Best!
Tom
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
@yoursunny
Here's a possible idea for how to proceed. For a while, beginning immediately or whenever you want to start, I probably could fund your ASN and perhaps also fund the associated website. You can keep the ASN "as is" in your name. If there are additional related costs which also might need funding, please let me know.
Maybe later we could do more. . . .
Best wishes!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
@yoursunny how much does cloudie charge for renewal?
The all seeing eye sees everything...
75$
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@yoursunny Maybe I could take you up on your 50% rental option if you prefer your rental option to my 100% funding suggestion. Thanks!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Get an LLC to mask your names, my 2 cents.
Personally I would not be comfortable with people besides my family browsing the internet using my ASN since my name is on it.
The all seeing eye sees everything...
I have been looking further into this and created a API layer using Flask to interface to virsh, it works fine with no issues.
The code for FOSSBilling is going to need a bit of modification to support VPS packages, since natively it seems to only be geared around web or reseller hosting in terms of how you define package resources. I can obviously tweak all this code because it's open source but then there needs to be consideration on how to update FOSSBilling going forward as any updates are going to overwrite my code or potentially break things.
Personally I don't think FOSSBilling is suitable to perform tasks around VPS' yet, but happy to hear any other inputs on this?
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That's pretty cool!
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Looks like, as you know, the options might be either co-ordinate with @BelleNottelling and @adly and the other FOSSBilling devs or else fork FOSSBilling and add your Flask-to-virsh integration to your fork.
Is your Flask to virsh code available somewhere? I'd love to take a look.
Thanks very much!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
+1
I can also try to help with this.
+1
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Not yet but will definitely share it once complete. It's changing rapidly at the moment to support new functions.
I've managed to use the hosting packages custom parameters within FOSSBilling to create VM on a hypervisor, so I now have a working order form that automatically provisions a barebones VM.
So far there is:
To do:
Hopefully the start/stop/reboot functions will be complete tonight, it's coming up to 4:30PM in the UK at the moment and I need log off for some life duties for a few hours
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Custom 'VPS' module that allows the customer to interact with their VM from the FOSSBilling client area.
This is great progress! Congrats!
Yes, please do let us know when you have some code online. I want to read it!
@BelleNottelling @adly
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Great News!
@crunchbits said "Sure" when I asked if I could please announce that Handsome Ryzen is coming for Beautiful Crunchy!
I will make a new thread when the time is right. . . .
Thanks @crunchbits!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Congrats, this is amazing news! @crunchbits is awesome and do so much for this community.