[solarkraft]

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).

[wpietri]

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]

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]

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.

[glenneroo]

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.

[xg15]

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/

[YPPH]

That's a really big caveat - thanks for flagging it.

Looks like web hosting or a mail server is completely out of the question.

[tyingq]

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

[ghostly_s]

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?

[glenneroo]

I have used numerous Pi-alternatives and the compatible distros are always a mess, not to mention finding support for why some package/GPIO isn't working is hit-or-miss. Try getting developers of a $10 board to patch bugs.

I have even spent more and used e.g. Asus Pi-compatible boards and it was always a dumpster fire - the last one I picked up was advertised as supporting 4K output, but getting it to actually work was beyond my capability, and when it did work, was topping out at 10 FPS. Writing to support ended up being a waste of time, all I ever got was vague answers as to why it should work without any actual solutions.

"Substantially cheaper and more energy efficient" - 9W max is already quite low[0] and cheaper? Pi devices are already pretty cheap, and the money goes to a good cause as opposed to cheap knock-offs where the money goes where? Also the cheaper you go, the less support you will probably receive. As noted by the link, StackExchange has a dedicated site just for Raspberry Pi questions. Good luck getting even close to the same level of information about any compatible boards, which probably cut corners by using sketchy hardware which may or may not be be patched in the future in their forked distro.

[0] https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/114239/pi-4-...

[SahAssar]

They don't give you a dedicated public IP, and only 10Mbit bandwidth.

[hellojesus]

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]

> 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.

[hellojesus]

I wrote Cloudfront but meant Cloudflare. My bad.

I have a script that updates the dns record on a free tier plan with Cloudflare, and since traffic passes through them I can open my residential network to only ports 80 and 443 from their ip4/6 addresses.

[Sebb767]

Next to the other arguments, the colocation is pretty cheap. In Germany, you can calculate ~20ct per Wattmonth for electricity, so ~1€ 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 ~6€ per month (assuming 50€ 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]

Scaleway's stardust is a lot cheaper though, and faster in terms of connectivity. But they are limited to 2 per customer

[GekkePrutser]

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

[ciex]

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.

[ed25519FUUU]

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]

There have been Mac Mini colos for ages.

[walrus01]

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.

[pmontra]

A use case with that bandwidth is shipping them a disk with a full backup and rsyncing the incrementals day by day.

[tyingq]

~10.5 days per TB over 10Mbps :)

[entropie]

Depending on use that might be enough. I synced 1.4tb over multiple days with like 30mbit/s. Who cares?

[walrus01]

for the very patient rclone users

[3xa]

Thank you, as far as we could find out, this is really unique.

GPIO: Currently there are no plans for this yet. It is not possible at the moment, we point this out during checkout and on the colocation administration page. However, we think nothing is impossible. If you have a use case, feel free to write me at [e-mail] ;)

[my123]

Small unit of dedicated hardware, without any other tenants on that same host.

[contravariant]

I mean sure, but if you've already bough a raspberry pi then you're most of the way there surely?

[tata71]

Hugely underrated comment.

[vmception]

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