What do you do with your idle servers?

onlinepersona@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 44 points –

Not sure if this is the right place to ask the question, but there doesn't seem to be an "askgeeks" or something.

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Make all of them run a bogosort on a list of 10-100 items. Whichever one finishes last gets shot. Repeat until you no longer have idle servers

make them enter powersaving states

How do you do that on a VPS?

the hoster will take care usually as low energy costs is a primary goal for them.

It's minimally specced machine. They should be able to handle it being at 70% CPU and memory most of the time.

do some folding?

(https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en)

Or some BOINCing.

I boinc in an LXC container with a cron job to run during the period in the day on weekdays when the electricity is pretty much all renewables (and I'm not watching Jellyfin). The intention is to turn sunlight into tiny forward progress towards curing cancer.

Specifically, the Community Grid projects Mapping Cancer Markers and Smash Childhood Cancer.

thats really great.

Im currently saving up on a new roof of an older farm building, and depending on the utilities I can come up I will put solar panels on it.

I am really thinking how to utilize the extra power, this one sounds like a great addition to an business concept for downtimes.

Do you have a recipe or script or something? The docker image seems to assume you're running it on your own computer and will be configuring it with some GUI? But I'm not going to install xfce on my server and RDP into it to get boinc running.

You don't need the GUI, the client does all the work. I use a Debian container, so just sudo apt-get install boinc-client.

Once that's installed, you go to the project (in my case, World Grid) and setup your account. As part of that, it will give you a URL and account key. Then back on your server, you use the boinccmd to --project_attach the URL and key.

If your electricity costs you nothing

thats in general the culprit with own server.

but in my place electricity itself costs not much, half of the cost is only taxes and other expenses around the energy.

therefore 200 kwh more or less in a year(that would be 25 watts) is not that much.

I tried finding instructions for running headless on a server, but everything seems to be for desktop users with a GUI. And the code is proprietary for some reason?

If you rent a VPS that might get you kicked, so check your terms first.

Turn them off, or repurpose them into Minecraft servers for friends. I'm using more resources running a modded server I don't play on than I am for actual productive work these days though.

I'm assuming you're talking about some individual VPC that you're paying for and not using. If you don't do anything with it in a week then just shut it down after downloading a disk image.

It's a sporadically active server for friends and family. They access it maybe a few times a day and it's the cheapest VPS I could find. So shutting down is not an option atm.