DEAL $99/yr Dedicated Server at ColoCrossing

[Halea]

With Labor Day around the corner ColoCrossing came up with attractive deals, one of which is a $99/year dedicated server with 4 cores / 8 threads, 16 GB DRAM, 240 GB SSD or 1 TB HDD, 1 IPv4, 40 TB bandwidth and most importantly IPMI.
Of course there are other ones at various price points, but this particular one is very attractive if you're interested in having a storage server of your own on the cloud. There is no backup at this price, but access to IPMI would allow you to partition the TB HDD and use some of it as a static storage unit. Then the sky is the limit regarding what you can do to secure your data (hint, backup locally then pump it out with rsync as non-live data for maximum security).

PS: To clarify, with a dedicated server you have access to the hardware through IPMI. Therefore, you can install a virtualizer of your choice on the hardware, and from there, you can have as many VPSes as you want/need (as long as the hardware is powerful enough to carry). During the initial host OS install you can partition the hard drive so that a portion of it is used for backups. Such backups being local they will happen at hardware speed. Then to secure them further you can move them to a remote location over the Internet at wire speed.

Also, note that ColoCrossing charge 3% extra for credit card or PayPal payments, which is still negligible.

 

[Halea]

By the time I posted my initial message up there I had already ordered one of those. It took CC about 2 hours to get the machine ready. This wasn't my first dedicated server so I had some experience with what was to follow, especially with IPMI.

The machine at that low price turned out to be an old one! But still a Supermicro (with an old 32nm Intel CPU).
I had chosen a 1TB HDD rather than the 240GB SSD as I was looking to turning this into a versatile server for friends and family. No regrets, that was a good choice, the machine performs well.
But before I got everything setup the way I wanted I faced some problems which almost made me throw the towel! But persistence eventually paid off!

The problem was (and still is) that the IPMI gateway is super-duper-over-secured and requires a java app to be (automatically) downloaded on your computer and used to give you access to the hardware setup.

The java app is written/tuned for windows dot net blah-blah-I-am-so-secure-oh-la-la, which I last used over 15 years ago on some relic called windozz!
Of course, there is an open source Linux version which is a bit iffy. It works but it's painful to handle and a major functionality is broken, that is the service to mount and upload your favorite OS CD, DVD or USB!

So without that how can you install Proxmox on your ancient Supermicro? Well, that's when your friendly CC's tech comes to help and saves the day! And that's how it all happened... They were nice enough to be my hands and mounted the Proxmox USB for me.

As a side note, I use IPMI on my own colocated hardware and the most recent Supermicro computers and the IPMI do not require any o that java/.net nonsense. Thank you progress!

Once Proxmox was up and running the next challenge was how to network it. With this low end deal CC provides a routed /30 ipv4 subnet. That's unfortunately only one usable IP since the second is for the gateway (the third for the network and forth for the broadcast). At one point I considered getting a /29 which would give 5 usable IPs, but that option would almost double the cost of the system. (About $8 a month or $96 a year additional for /29)
Since my "hobby budget" is on a diet, I decided to stick to 1 IP and I took the easy path; I assigned it to the Proxmox server itself.

Ideally, I would install pfsense as a VM and assign the public IP to its WAN interface and give a private IP to the Proxmox server but that would require at some point to do some housekeeping over the IPMI network which has its own /30 subnet. Unfortunately the fragility of the IPMI tools on this specific setup didn't give me the confidence level that it would work smoothly, and although the CC techs are friendly and fast, I wouldn't want to abuse their patience. At the end of the day you get what you pay for and frankly what CC gives for $103 for a year (including the PayPal fees) is absolutely extraordinary!

Now, once the public IP goes to Proxmox the only way one can get networking to the VMs is through iptables NAT, which makes installing pfsense a moot point as it would then require double NAT'ing, which I don't like doing.

So here we go! After brushing my iptables skills with help from ChatGPT and Ward's ready to use IncrediblePBX-2025D appliance for Proxmox I got a new PBX on the cloud in less than an hour (most of the time spent on iptables NAT and avoiding conflicts with Proxmox's firewall).

Does everything work? I suspect so! I only tested incoming and outgoing calls over BulkVS and AnveoDirect.
I used a couple of Grandstream desk phones as well as my favorite Obi. I also tried Zoiper on Android. They all worked flawlessly!

But there is an issue that I can't figure out yet. There is some idle time of around 5 to 8 seconds before the call starts ringing both in incoming and outgoing calls. And I do remember that I faced this issue a long time ago and somehow I found a fix. But of course I can no longer remember ...

Anyone with any thoughts about the call delay issue please chime in.
Sorry for the length of this post.

 

[hecatae]

have you got sngrep installed?

 

[Halea]

No, I didn't try to debug the delay issue yet since I was busy installing other VMs like nextcloud, mailcow, jellyfin, etc.
In the process I also moved my home pbx over to this new server and interestingly it didn't exhibit the same delay problem. But that's an old setup built on Debian 10, so I am still interested in moving to something more recent and better supported.
I also did quite a bit of security checking and benchmarking. It looks like my firewall on the host is holding up well. Several honeypots I installed as VMs showed attempts to compromise the system, but the host remained safe and secure.
This is probably my first system relying on iptables for both NAT and firewall, so I am sill a bit uneasy about claiming that I'm done in terms of configuration strategy. But it will do for now ...

PS: One thing I have to emphasize about this machine is that it is fast, actually very fast!
I guess when the cpu is not shared with an unknown number of other VPSes you realize that 4 cores and 8 threads are a lot! Especially if those cores are of x86-64/amd64 type compared to ARM cpu cores.

 

[Halea]

I've just stumbled on this OP of mine from over 7 months ago and I thought I should update it.

The long and the short of it is that it has been a great experience and it was worth every penny. I just hope that when it is renewal time I will be able to extend it for one more year for the same price, and I might even consider going for additional IPs.

Host OS installation on this particular hardware has been a bit challenging because of its older IPMI software which requires client side java, etc. But with some updates and help from the data center folks I came pretty close to full autonomy. But then, once proxmox was installed and the single public IP properly mapped I really didn't have to reinstall the host OS.

As for the firewalling part, well it has been fun and very educational. Initially I used iptables alone to do firewalling and NAT. Then at one point I decided to install pfsense as a VM and I relied on it for all NAT+firewall. Then I went back to iptables on the host again once I tested everything more in depth and felt it was a safe and secure configuration.

The machine has been a blast! 4 physical cores with 8 threads at over 3GHz. 16 GiB of RAM, 1 TiB of HDD. 1 Gbps port yielding better than 800 Mbps actual Internet access speed. All those resources exclusively available to me without having to share with anyone else. On top of that not a minute of unscheduled down time.

As for the VMs that I have been running; IncrediblePBX (of course), Dockerized MailCow on its own VM, NextCloud based multimedia storage with tons of bells and whistles, OpenMediaVault as a NAS, Two redundant pihole+unbound servers on their own VMs, and a few other experimental things.

 

[hecatae]

$49 year

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/216670/george-datacenter-vps-from-4-60-los-angeles-dallas-ashburn-kansas

4Vcpu | 16GB DDR4
100GB NVMe
AMD EPYC 7571
5TB Bandwidth
1 Gbps Port
1 IPv4
KVM Virtfusion Panel
Dallas or Ashburn

 

[hecatae]

Oh and

Shopping Cart - GreenCloud

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/216691/greencloud-top-1-provider-2024-2025-double-promotions-and-flash-sale-giveaways/p1