Be a VPS for other people?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨snekerpimp@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I have friends and relatives that would like to do some memory and compute intensive tasks, but lack the hardware locally. I have loads of ram doing nothing and a little compute to spare. Is there a way for me to set up some service accessible to them that would allow them to spin up VMs, similar to Linode or DigitalOcean? I know letting outside access to a proxmox server would be disastrous. I guess I could setup a VPN server into a virtualized proxmox server? Would rather find a way to point them to a url with a username and password and have them able to use my server as their vps like AWS or Linode.

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bfg9k@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The moment you start charging for access to your hardware you have to start signing SLAs, have documented backups available, have a support team on hand, it’s just a nightmare. Would not recommend.

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- Molecular0079@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  OP might not be looking to make a full paid service considering he’s just doing this for friends and relatives.
  
  I get the sentiment though. I run a Jellyfin server that I share with a few friends and some of them have flat out told me that I should start charging for it. I refused because getting paid for it just sets up an expectation that it will be reliable and have all the stuff that they want. Personally, I don’t want that kind of pressure. I want to be able to tweak the server and install new things / updates without worrying about uptime.
  
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  - VonReposti@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I tell my friends that my SLA for my media server is Shit’s Likely Available just so they understand that I give it out of generosity and don’t want anything in return. The bonus is that keeping brutally honest upfront likely means less risk of me ruining someone’s Friday movie night.
    
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- snekerpimp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Was not looking to make a paid service, was just trying to help my dad out and my friend learn without them paying a VPS company.
  
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  - ares35@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    i understand they don't want to pay, but would $12.00 for a full year be cheap enough to consider? ovh has a new customer deal going for 2gb ram/20gb storage vps. $0.97 a month for the first year, and you can add up to ten of those to a single new account.
    
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BeanCounter@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Sorry not answering your quetion but that sounds like a complete nightmare to me.

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- snekerpimp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Probably is, from what everyone is commenting. Was just trying to help my dad and a friend not pay for VPS, but it’s not looking likely.
  
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railsdev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Sidestepping the nightmare everyone else is bringing up: could they containerize their workloads? To me it’d sound simpler to just give them access to a Docker instance or Kubernetes on your machine.

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- snekerpimp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  My dad could probably figure out how to get done what he needs to in that environment, but my friend is just learning and that would be a huge leap for him. Was trying to KISS it as much as possible.
  
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SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I know you’re trying to go full self service but that’s likely overkill and given your limited resources you should maintain some control.

How about setting up resource pools in proxmox? You can permission accounts so that your dad and your friend only have access to manage the vms in their resource pool. You would need to create the vms/containers for them and assign to the pool but that would be the extent of your involvement. But that would allow you to maintain a certain level of control over your environment.

To be clear you’d just be creating the vm. They could do the actual os installs and whatnot provided you permission the pool properly.

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LiveLM@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I would just set up a separate VM for each of them and let them SSH/VNC in. Don’t think they’ll be doing anything that requires them to destroy and recreate their Virtual Machines constantly right?

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h3ndrik@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Give them a user account and let them ssh in.

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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access
VNC	Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

[Thread #145 for this sub, first seen 18th Sep 2023, 11:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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thefactremains@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Maybe caprover gets you close to this?

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