Pinode: Raspberry Pi in the Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Pinode: Raspberry Pi in the Cloud

pinode.pythonanywhere.com

86 pointsgpjt47 comments

Or you could just buy a Raspberry PI, and send it to EDIS in Austria: http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/

And there you get FREE symmetrical 100mbit connection with no monthly payment. And you can always get your Raspberry Pi back if you need to, you just need to pay a few euros for postage.

Holy crap, someone's doing this for real?!

Yup. I've got friends who have their PIs there, works like a charm. I would send mine but I use it as a TimeMachine server at home. But tbh it would be worth it to buy another one and send it there just to have a remote ssh server through which I could tunnel in times of need.

<i> I would send mine but I use it as a TimeMachine server at home.</i>

Holy shit, just looked this up. What a great idea (instead of paying $$$ for a Time Capsule).

Yeah both my and my dad use it to back up our macs. It cost me $35 for the raspberry pi and $80 for a 1TB drive a few months ago.

The only issue is that Raspberry Pi has its Lan connected through the USB internally, so the USB drive and Lan share bandwidth - which means that my backups run at 5-6MB/s, which is not ideal, but works just fine. Just leave it for a few hours when you do your first backup,and after that it runs completely fine ;-)

Rule 34... Can someone post some shots of their facilities. I'm just interested. Ya know.

This has been "out of stock" since right after it was announced.

They do increase capacity regularly, just keep checking.

Is there any way to be notified when slots open up? I've been checking off and on since it was announced and it's always been "out of stock".

Clearly you need to run a cronjob that checks every minute and texts you when it becomes available...

If only I had a cheap and minimal ARM based computer running in the cloud I could run this cronjob on...

There are a number of other similar offers. Just Google for "free raspberry pi hosting" (+ your country, maybe).

For example, here's a Dutch hosting company:

   https://www.pcextreme.nl/en/
   http://raspberrycolocation.com/home/

You can send them your Raspberry Pi for free (or buy one from them) and they will provide free power and network connectivity (500 GB/month). Offer is valid for an indefinite period of time, but at least 12 months.

It's regularly available. Like now, if you click the link.

How do they make money?

They probably don't make money on this service, but just look at their website - they offer tons of other services in few different countries, that's where the money is coming from. Their raspberry pi offer is more likely a promotion thing, because it costs them very little to run and attracts people to their company.

I really recommend NOT going with edis. I have sent my Raspberry Pi there and had constant trouble with it. It’s unreachable via IPv6 and/or IPv4 for long periods of time (days) and good luck contacting anyone about it. I will request to have it sent back soon.

All in all, this is not even usable for any toy projects.

YMMV - Two of my friends have theirs there and they work fine as far as I know. I personally had problems with providers where I was actually paying money for their service, so there is no perfect company.

Can I ask why (without trying to sound awful and steal someone's front page thunder)? If you want to do something interesting with the Pi you'll probably be wanting to connect other hardware to it. You can't when it is in the cloud. Otherwise, it is just a general purpose Arm/Linux board that has far less power than anything else you could get in the cloud-o-spehere...so I'm just genuinely wondering what you would use this for? Plus, the hardware is so cheap ($25-35 USD), it sorta defeats the purpose of HW in the cloud to save cost (hardware as a service, e.g. EC2, etc)..

Try buying it :)

[Edit] ah ok -- nice troll :)

As an alternative to low-end VPS's it's not the worst idea in the world at $5 a month. It'd cost more than that to upgrade your home's cable internet connection to be able to serve traffic decently.

For $5 a month you could alternatively get a reasonably beefy VPS at DIgitalOcean / another provider.

I forgot I had this extension enabled: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt and hilarity ensued.

I wrote a similar script that changed iPhone, iPad etc with bat phone, bat pad etc.

I love it. See what happens when you click one of the "Buy" buttons.

Agreed.

I found myself halfway to a facepalm until I clicked the "Buy" button. Beautifully executed trolling.

The bottom bit of copy was great -- but until then I was like "hmmm... is this real?"

BTW I'd like to thank the guys at Zurb for producing Foundation. The whole Pinode site took less than 45 minutes to write, of which we spent about ten minutes on the design and the rest on the jokes. And we'd never done anything with Foundation before. Definitely a fantastic framework for putting a product site together quickly.

Would you say that Foundation is better fit for marketing/product sites, while Bootstrap is better for webapps/admins?

Can't say. We used bootstrap for our main product site and it was great. We found foundation better for the pinode marketing site but we've never used it for a webapps, so it might be better for those too.

This should have been saved for 1 April. It's good advertising though, and since it hit the front page of HN it's probably driving a ton of traffic to their site.

We probably should have waited but it was one of those silly ideas you get on a Friday evening and we're probably never have got round to it if we'd not done it right away.

In terms of traffic to our main site -- not too much, 400 extra visitors or so. But that's not a problem, we did it because we thought it was funny, and put in the link to PythonAnywhere as an afterthought. Just wanted to share the joke.

That said, the Pinode site is running in one of our standard $5/month accounts and is handling a Hacker News front page (a few dozen hits/second) without even breaking a sweat. Just sayin'...

Would love to see some pictures of the 'data centre'

I imagine it would looks something like this: http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/...

One of the best features of the RPI is integration with other hardware (i2c, SPI, GPIO). It's neat to toggle a motor from a bash prompt. When that goes away, it's just a linux box. It looks like you are having fun though, so I applaud that. Edit: I guess the joke was lost on me.

How do you do the DVI video capturing? Framegrabbers and IP KVM modules are dead expensive, AFAIK - and how do you handle reformatting?

Despite the fact that the OP is in jest, I found myself wondering the same. The best we could come up with at the office was to get some SDHC cards that are hardware read-only lockable (the spec says they exist [1], but I wasn't able to find any to purchase). On these SDHC cards, you stick a PXE-like implementation that allows it to pull a disk image off another machine in the DC, install it to an attached USB drive, then chainboot to that disk.

This setup would allow customers to upload an image which is effectively burned and attached to the hardware during an automated provisioning process. When the node is powered down, the USB drive is wiped by the next provisioning.

The customer is expected to set up the image so that it provides ssh (or what have you) on boot. Since the failure state of, say, a kernel panic in this setup is complete data loss, there's no need for KVM or anything.

It probably wouldn't be a very competitive service, but as mentioned elsewhere, for $5/month most applications are likely better off with a VPS anyway.

[1] http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-...

eh, I've been looking at doing something like this (hosting PI units) and the OOB solution I'm considering is soldering on a serial console.

I would also need to figure out some automated bootloader setup, of course.

Maybe you should pay to have built a batch of a thousand custom boards that are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the standard Raspberry Pi, so that they have a proper serial port etc.

You could also consider putting more than one ARM computer on each board (at which point maybe you want fewer than a thousand boards) and building an ethernet switch into that board, etc, and maybe you could even hardwire all the serial lines within the board, etc.

maybe. My partner has experience with that sort of thing, so yeah, that's an idea for a kickstarter or something. It would be awesome publicity for the sorts of people I like to sell to.

But from what I'm told, it's a fairly simple soldering job to put a serial port on a regular pi.

Personally, I'd want to add more ram if I'm going to bother with a whole goddamn board spin, and maybe remove the video hardware, but then, I don't know how involved that would be, and meh, I have a tonne of other work she could be doing now that she's working here that would probably provide a better return, and eh, the window for starting a custom spin of a pi board and having it done before the pi is obsolete is probably closing anyhow, so maybe next revision?

That's big problem with custom hardware... By the time you are done with all the Engineering effort and debugging, well, there's better hardware out there. Remember the neo? That's why you'd want to start with something mostly done (that was only recently released) and then make minor changes (and why removing video and adding more ram might be a bad idea?)

I call BS, I would really like to see someone prove that these are all really raspi units and not just Debian Squeeze instances running on a virtual server.

Also, I have a raspi myself. The beauty of the raspi is not that you get to eat the pie, its that you get to make it yourself. Cloud connected? I think you mean Internet, not cloud. You know, unless these are Debian Squeezes on a virtualized box. Don't have the time? Then you can't have this hobby. End of rant.

Click the buy button then come back and rant some more.

Excellent!

I was about to close the webpage when I looked at more than just the bronze subscription.

I so wanted this. :(

Most of the power of the BCM2835 is in the GPU. A headless rPi is a waste of perfectly good silicon.

Shouldn't this announcement have waited about a week?

love it!

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