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FreeMach™ - VirMach - End of Year 2 Report
This is a continuation of the End of Year 1 Report for the FreeMach™ service now that another year has passed. Big thank you goes out to @VirMach for sponsoring this server for an additional year!
FreeMach Overview
FreeMach™ is a free service providing free KVM VPSes to LET members that was enabled by a sponsored E3 unmanaged VirMach server won during the 2017 Provider Poll. The service was offered because when I won the free server for a year, I did not have a purpose in mind. I didn't want it to go to waste idling away, thus I decided to give back to the community. The project has since expanded to a EU node in Sofia, BG, thanks to the wonderful folks over at AlphaVPS. A similar report will be posted once a year has been completed at that location in a few short months.
Here are some example projects that are/have been running on FreeMach --
- GeoDNS Load Balancing
- EasyEngine Testing
- Private File Sharing
- MariaDB Galera Cluster
- NodeJS App Development
- Non-Profit University Organization's Website
- Rancher Testing
- IPv6 HE.net Tunnel Testing
- Hindi Community Website
- Control Panel Development
- Video Encoding Tool Testing and Development
- Web IDE / Dev Environment for School Projects
- Automated Build of Android Projects
- VOIP Module Development
- Mirror for Open Source Virtualization Platform Distributions
- Personal Media Server
- and a quite a bit more...
Quick VirMach Review
I'll keep this one short and sweet since everything has been smooth as butter this past year. The box hasn't had any hiccups throughout the entire year. In May of this year, I reinstalled Proxmox and loaded up ProxCP as the control panel for both myself and end users to use to manage and deploy the VMs. The server has had ~15-20 unique tenants running various projects.
We are keeping up with the tradition and FreeMach has experienced zero abuse since the service first started nearly two years ago.
VirMach has been solid during the entirety of this service. Uptime has always been a non-issue with network and power chugging along day after day with no major interruptions. I don't think I ever had a reason to reach out to VirMach for support for this server during this period aside from getting acquainted with their IPMI setup.
Server Usage
Stats and graphs, because why not?
Avg usage has been pretty light for the most part, but there's some cool projects that are running on the node. Data for the graphs were reset in May when the reinstall took place, so that's as far back as the history goes.
Network:
CPU:
Load Avg:
Memory:
Conclusion
Thanks and praise goes out to @VirMach again for sponsoring this server for the FreeMach project and giving a home to many users with neat projects. I'd like to thank all the participants of the FreeMach service, I hope the VMs have treated you well and have helped you achieve some of your goals.
If VirMach feels inspired enough to sponsor this for another year, I will definitely be willing to keep this location going. But I also realize providers have to eat too (especially after doing insane day-after-day Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals), so I appreciate all of the time we've had.
Thanks all,
-Mason
FreeMach is sponsored by VirMach (sponsored US location), @AlexBarakov (AlphaVPS sponsored EU location), and ProxCP (sponsored VM Control Panel).
Comments
I wonder if there are any "I got a freemach server, no longer need this virmach vm" in the cancellation field @VirMach
Nice write-up :-)
That server is mostly idle from the looks of those graphs, which is a testament to the good behavior of the members :-)
Hmm, are there any other alternatives to this though? Haven't finished with the LineageOS project yet due to how much of a pain it is to port to my tablet.
Hopefully more of the reverse -- "Wow, this location rocks! I need me some more premium Buffalo servers!"
I actually encourage my users to not idle their resources, but most of the stuff have some spikes in usage here and there, but on average are pretty tame. Load max look slightly more interesting
--
I can transfer a select few over from the US node to the EU node once the end date is reached, but the specs won't match up 1:1 (mainly disk space which will be much less). Not sure how I'll handle that fairly yet.
Or maybe VirMach will have some new years specials going with somewhat similar specs (can't remember if they did one last year).
I've been on the freemach buffalo server since June and it has been such a treat. This VM has actually been extremely reliable and was always there when I needed it. I was one of the users running code-server to work on college term projects and there was never even a blip where I had issues with the VM. I want to personally thank @virmach and @MasonR for allowing this awesome experiment to happen.
Things I built on freemach:
Machine learning image classifier to identify school buildings + classifier api
A serverless rest API, hadoop running on social media data, and frontend that I eventually deployed to AWS lambda +s3
Clustered microservice-based music api (cassandra, postgres, flask, memcache, kong all running on my VM)
Those were my semesters class projects and every single one was built on this spectacular service.
Thanks again for such an awesome experience!
Out of curiosity, was it a company running the GeoDNS Load Balancing? I use AWS currently but happy to use a smaller one if it helps out an LET user.
This is indeed one of the most successful projects on LET. Let's hope @VirMach would continue supporting it.
Keep up the good work.
If memory serves me right, I believe it was @MrPsycho that was running that on FreeMach for a while. Just for experimenting/learning, though, not as a company.
I recently just applied for fmarch! 😆😆
That's truely impressive.
Lets hope good news from @VirMach are on the way.
Here I was relaxing on the day after Christmas when all of the sudden I got a feeling that I missed a gift. Sure enough, after checking my account, it seems Santa @VirMach stopped by with a gift for us -
Thank you VirMach for extending the service by another year! It will certainly go towards a good cause
Congrats for the gift...
Is there any US based box available?
I am interested to get one...
@MasonR
No December 2019 Renewal ticket?
The US node is full at the moment. Application are accepted on a rolling basis and I'll reach out to make sure you still have a use for the VPS if you're selected in the future.
Negative, sir. Will be sending out Jan 2020 renewal tickets in the next few days.