Vps on blog.iankulin.com

Basic VPS disk speed

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t help but measure some VPS disk speeds while I was busting out the fio.

Binary Lane only claims “pure SSD drives” but seems pretty great. The difference between Digital Ocean SSD and NVME is disappointing. Obviously you’re sharing a drive with other users, so perhaps this depends on what else is going on.

Digital Ocean first impressions

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the time it takes me to provision a guest VM in Proxmox. I seem to remember on BinaryLane it was seconds rather than minutes. This seemed to be a good excuse to use the free credit I’ve heard about for Linode or Digital Ocean hundreds of times in podcast adverts, so I claimed the $200 credit for being a Late Night Linux listener at Digital Ocean. They extracted $5 out of me in the process, so I guess they are in front on that transaction. $200 would run a little VM for a couple of years at their rates, but of course it’s limited to two months, at the end of which I will have an account sitting there, with my credit card already recorded - so all the friction is gone if I need an internet facing machine for some purpose - which is clearly their dastardly plan

The process of creating a ‘droplet’ (that’s what they call their VM’s) was straightforward - select the datacentre, machine size etc You can upload your SSH key which is a nice touch.

When I got to the end of all that, I hit create and timed the boot up of the Debian 12 system I’d chosen - 42.13 seconds.

I could ping the public IP, so it existed, but couldn’t ssh in as root, and didn’t know my user name. After trawling through their Getting Started docs, I found one that said to use your email that you signed up with. That didn’t make sense or work. I watched a video, then searched further and found I should have gone into the advanced options and written a script to add a user - a sample one was provided.

I destroyed the first machine and created a second one with the sample user script (which I’ve since gone back and searched for but could not find) which basically adds the user and assigns the ssh key. Once that was booted I could ssh in, but not sudo since I didn’t know the password.

There is a ‘console’ so I used that to set a password for the user the script had created, then was able to both ssh in and use sudo. I guess the idea of the script is great if you know what you’re doing and going to be creating a lot of VM’s, but this was a painful start compared to BinaryLane or my homelab. I figured out afterwards, this was because I’d chosen Debian for the distro - you can’t ssh in as root. If I choose a more relaxed distro, I could do that, and create my user then patch up the root access.

The rest of the experience was fine - the web interface is clear enough apart from my initial grumble. I couldn’t paste into the web console, and I’ve noticed that in Proxmox as well so I guess that’s some sort of limitation. In any case, once you’ve set up your ssh user properly you never need use it again.

Adding a Domain Name to a VPS

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a small BinaryLane VPS for a while that I use for homelab type stuff, but now need to serve a tiny amount of JSON from it. A longer term plan is to use it as a Wireguard tunnel back to my cluster at home to expose the services that need to be internet facing. I’ve also had a domain name I bought from Porkbun sitting round for a bit, so it’s probably a good time to join them up.

When you type a domain name into your web browser it needs to be turned into an IP address in order to return the content you need from that web server. For example if I type in google.com it needs to be turned into 172.217.24.46 in order to fetch the front page of Google.

The things that provide this translation service are the Domain Name Service (DNS). There’s several layers of DNS and if the first layer asked does not know, the request gets escalated until it is found or the request fails - but somewhere in that chain there needs to be a name server (the Authoritative DNS) that knows the domain name and the IP address. DNS is cached all over the place, so most requests don’t get all the way back there (and changes sometimes take a little while to percolate around) but there must an an authoritative name server somewhere.

It’s possible to have my domain pointed to the BinaryLane name servers, but it’s currently pointed to the Porkbun name servers, and it’s simpler for me to leave it there.

All I need to do at the Porkbun end is go into Domain Management, and open up the “DNS entries” for the domain, and edit the “A Records” to point at the IP address.

And that’s enough that a few minutes later, typing the domain address into a web browser pulls up the test page from the Nginx web server running in a container on my VPS.

Your own Aussie server on BinaryLane

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Listening to podcasts, I’ve been jealous of US developers who seem to have masses of $5/month VPS (Virtual Private Server) options. When I looked for similar Australian offerings a few months ago, they all seem to start at around $35 which is outside of my ‘have a play with something’ budget range.

I could of course use one of the international options, but one of the main apps on my app ideas list needs to be hosted in Australia and work under Australian data privacy rules. That might be the case for Digital Ocean (or other US companies) if you select an AU server, but I’m not a lawyer. For the imaginary clients of my imaginary app, me being able to say that the hosting is with an Australian company in Australia would be a plus.

I was having another look recently and discovered that Mammoth (who are reputable Australian VPS providers) have a service branded “binary lane” that is aimed at developers needing to quickly stand up test servers that are at this low end price point.

I mean, “ex GST” is a bit sly, but still, this is definitely in the starting price category I’m interested in. Naturally the prices scale up as your needs do.

I started hitting buttons to make an account, and true to the advertising, I was logged into an Ubuntu (you can chose from a heap of ISOs or upload your own) server that was live on the internet, hosted from Sydney, with it’s own IP address inside a minute. A few minutes after that, I’d done updates, installed Docker and had a website live on the internet.

It has a nice panel interface in their web site with a console and some vital statistics and information.

Although convenient, the webpage console has a tiny lag I find unsettling, so as soon as I had the basics sorted out I switched to ssh from my MacBook terminal.

This was a super painless experience, and super affordable. Since they are in the business of selling you more VPS capacity, it looks like the process of scaling up your virtual machine as needed is going to be painless as well.

My plan for this VPS is to use it to learn how to add a domain, set up SSL, and eventually just keep it as a test server for apps and api endpoints.