Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering
hetzner.com
hetzner.com
I contemplated setting up a rental service for them (something like $40-50/mo?) since I have symmetric 2 gbps fiber to my office, but I just haven't prioritized.
Are people actually interested enough for this to really be worth it?
Having said that, how would the user access this? Would you have some kind of VMs or how did you imagine it?
If re-imaging them wasn't such a pain in the ass, I'd offer daily at something silly like $3/day. That way they only need to rent it when they need it, and the 8 minis would stretch farther, but I'd have to automate the re-image somehow, so more work.
User would access it via VNC to a subdomain that is pointed to a VLAN inside my office. They would be full metal to the M1, not VMs.
You could donate them to open source projects for improving their software (either physical or as a service).
Would this actually brick them? Wouldn't a factory reset (how I've always re-imaged Macs) not wipe that out?
Only reasonable option I've come across so far is buying used hardware. VM under Win10/AMD seems like a PITA.
1) Access to a Desktop Mac and a Desktop Safari.
2) An iOS device.
The Safari debugger recognizes a plugged-in iOS device and then allows to debug the iOS safari remotely. That's the only reliable way to find iOS specific JS or CSS issues. Browserstack alone does not help, unfortunately AFAIR.
I don't mean that that would be an impediment to porting; Apple have done this before—Safari 5 was available for Windows. (And interestingly, vice-versa, IE5 was available for macOS!)
What I mean is that the differences in implementation of these OS libraries would mean that this version of Safari wouldn't be bug-for-bug compatible with macOS Safari; and therefore, testing on this version of Safari wouldn't necessarily get you what you want, if your goal is finding and squashing 100% of the bugs that testing on macOS Safari would allow you to find and squash.
To use a pretty close analogy, it would be like a development workflow for Windows executable that involved running them under Wine in Linux, and never actually under Windows. You've QAed for the API surface, sure; but you haven't actually QAed the software for how Microsoft's own library implementations work (and the bugs that those implementations introduce.)
Sure, if you're making a plugin that plays with bookmarks or 'Read Later', you'd likely run afoul of the issues you mention. But most web devs are concerned just about browser compatibility of rendering their web-app. In this context, as long as web page rendering and JS engine is identical between OS' it's fine.
Or, for that matter, there could be certain exposed -webkit CSS selectors that are really just features of some or another macOS rendering-layer framework, with no Windows equivalent — the same way that IE's ancient CSS "filters" were really just exposed DirectX features (e.g. filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.blur). For these cases, testing on "Safari on Windows" would essentially just get you what testing in Chrome on Windows already gets you (unless Apple created an entire software renderer that brings in all of macOS's Quartz and all its subsidiary libraries as a big ol' polyfill.)
The point at which Safari is guaranteed to work like it does on macOS, is the point at which you're bringing in a polyfill consisting of 99% of macOS's frameworks. May as well bring in the last 1% as well, and call it a VM. (Ideally a thin-as-possible paravirtualized VM where the display driver is written to directly make DirectX calls, etc. — but VM client software is already pretty good at providing these sorts of drivers.)
1. https://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/combining-h...
2. https://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/javanese-te...
Edit: Looks like the new URL is https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67?numbuilds=400 but the build has been broken for almost 2 weeks. The last successful build is the 300MB https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/archives.webkit.org/win-x... (as explained in the link above, the Apple Application Support libraries are required).
I believe the trickiest bit was running a macOS serial generation app and copying that value into the VM settings.
(I've purchased plenty of Macs over the years so pls Apple, this is just for dev purposes!)
Are you saying that "aarch64" binaries don't run on all ARM chips?
It supports remote desktop and everything you would need
> Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement.
> Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement.
If you're just doing it for personal use, this probably isn't a big deal. If you're doing it for your business, make sure you consider the risks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797129
404 points by nixcraft 11 days ago | 117 comments
Wouldn't you be able to have only a single identity? Because unless you can have multiple identities with a single instance, it would be a very expensive way of having iMessage capabilities.
I ordered one of these M1 Minis from Hetzner last night as soon as I saw the announcement. It was provisioned and ready this afternoon. Initial impression is good, it's a Big Sur M1 Mini. I paid extra (EUR 69/mo) to get two 1TB SSDs as well, since we often run up against the 256GB storage limitation.
Hetzner provide a dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6 /64, SSH access is via a password. Unlike MacStadium, VNC access didn't seem to be enabled initially, but some Googling around yielded the ASD command to turn that on. Our Hetzner firewall config blocks everything but port 22 anyway, so I tunneled VNC port 5900 through SSH and it worked fine.
The open question, which only time will answer, is network connectivity. MacStadium (or at least the Atlanta data center we use) seems to have pretty reliable connectivity, but our Hetzner runners sometimes fail with some transient network glitch while trying to download a random dependency now and then. Fortunately most of the tools we use will auto-retry, so even if we do have sporadic network connectivity glitches for the price it's well worth it.
[1] https://forum.hetzner.com/index.php?thread/28493/&postID=280...
The linked post says this:
"Danke für das Interesse an dem neuen Produkt!
Die Fragen zum Betriebssystem sollten sich durch die Veröffentlichung der Produktmatrix beantwortet haben. Es wird das aktuelle macOS Big Sur installiert.
Bei der Einrichtung und Zugangsmöglichkeiten haben wir uns nur für SSH entschieden. Nicht jeder Kunde möchte mit einem aktiven VNC-Zugang starten. Wie auch der eine oder andere beschrieben hat, ist die Einrichtung/Aktivierung nicht schwer. Gerne könnt ihr dazu auch einen Community-Artikel schreiben und weiteren Kunden helfen.
Welche Alternativen zu VNC würdet ihr Vorschlagen oder hättet ihr gerne, die wir uns mal anschauen sollten?"
I don't understand German, but I ordered one and received SSH login instructions, and was able to get VNC enabled and connected by tunneling port 5900 through the SSH connection.
It's not just a login. You need to actually be a customer. I consider that a good thing, because it allows me (and Hetzner) to speak more freely compared to a fully public forum. That's also why I just linked to the forum instead of quoting.
> and unfortunately is often in German.
That's true. The majority of the active user|customer base is German (I am myself) and thus communicating in German is the obvious choice. I've seen a few English-speaking folks participating by using a translator of choice to read the threads and then simply responding in English. I think it works well enough, as virtually every German understands English. Especially a German running servers.
Hosting providers would also love it because it's super small form factor and extremely low on power usage.
The Scaleway service had such awful latency on the VNC connection that I found it almost completely unusable. MacStadium and Hetzner are both better. That's particularly odd because I'm based in Kyiv, Ukraine, so I would have expected better latency to Paris than to Atlanta. It might have been a problem on my ISP's end, I didn't spend any time looking into it.
Besides that, the Hetzner offer is by far the cheapest, as is usually the case with Hetzner. If you don't mind having to do all configuration yourself, and you don't require a flashy whiz-bang UI for managing your provisioned resources, Hetzner is a great value.
My only gripe would be that running your business on Hetzner can be a little bit scary at times since they have so much unattended automation in place to block abuse. For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning. I don't have any other providers to compare this against, so that might just be how it is.
I had a CS class last semester where the students used some Hetzner cloud servers. I always got an email or two before having the servers IPs blocked. And it were mostly students' faults by choosing easy passwords..
I recommend Hetzner! No affiliation, just a happy user..
To be fair, you can also book a managed server with them.
For their hosted hardware offering, HDD/SSD swaps (or even "we replace everything about your server because it produces random faults except your HDDS") are within reasonable timeframes (i.e. usually within an hour).
They, however, will not diagnose this for you - that part is on you.
I have heard that they disconnect you for a couple of hours if youre being heavily DDOSSed tho.
It's only hosting personal stuff though, nothing popular or for business. Uptime has been good so far as well.
One disadvantage might be the Gigabit ports on most servers, if you really need a lot of bandwidth.
That said, there are some products certain customers expect that they will not sell you (and don't advertise). For example, you won't be able to click a button to deploy Software Y pre-configured by the provider as you might with Digital Ocean. What you'll get is mostly along the lines of "server with the OS of your choice and your SSH key installed on it". If that's what you're looking for, Hetzner is difficult to beat on price to performance.
I used to run several root-servers and once they started their cloud-offering moved everything over there.
Support was always great (although rarely needed), performance is fantastic, prices hard to beat.
I love the simplicity of their cloud offering which fits my use-cases perfectly and doesn't put the burden of overly complex products, APIs and tools on me as a user.
The biggest issue is their limited regions. Otherwise I’ve only ever been extremely happy.
I have a bare metal + several cloud instances on Hetzner.
OP, you can look up the numeric formats for Germany in your system preferences or Excel or similar — it can help to see them templated out sometimes.
I'm confused as to how they can be confused.
Even in my comma-as-separator country, our calculators have a dot. The only thing that could be confusing is encountering numbers with 3 decimals: 123,456 vs 123.456
1. I did not notice the M1 was being offered on rent. I assumed it was for sale at the listed price.
2. Since 58.31 € is an unrealistic price for an M1 machine (and since this is a European site) I concluded the site must be using a comma instead of a dot. 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall.
Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European and the M1 is being offered on rent.
[edit: this comment written before the parent comment was edited to include point 1]
You're on the international version of the site.
If you go to the German version, they quote the price as 58,31 €:
Not really... the Mac Pro is famous for its high price, but this explicitly says mac mini which is almost exactly an order of magnitude less than 5831 € .
I don’t know where you live, but €5000 is not a realistic price for a mac mini in any place I’ve heard of.
Dots are only used in groups of 3 (unless India, as far as I’m aware).
Anyway, not saying you weren’t confused. But I think it’s fairly easy to figure out that there’s no way the dot in this situation is meant as a thousands seperator.