Re: Using the Hetzner Cloud

[Ellen Papsch]

Hi,

Am Montag, den 17.02.2020, 14:47 +0100 schrieb Jonathan Brielmaier:
> Hi folks,
> 
> as promised on the Guix Days in Bruxelles I asked Hetzner[0] if they
> could provide us some free VMs in their cloud[1].
> 
> A few days ago they came back go to me. Sadly they can't provide us
> free
> VMs, but they will give us 30 EUR credit for the first month.
> 
> As they bill hour-wise and offer a serial console over HTTPS, you can
> do
> tests for stuff like the installer for 2 or 3 cents :)
> 
> What do you think about it?
> 
> ~Jonathan
> 

a few days ago I requested the Guix installer from Hetzner as well. I
gave them the ISO URL from Guix website. They mounted it without
modification, which prevented boot due to the image being compressed. I
had to supply the uncompressed image, which booted fine.

The installer was not able to install right away. I could complete all
the GUI steps. When it came to guix system init, it bailed with the
message that an initrd-module may be missing. System init (and the
subsequent boot) worked fine with:

(initrd-modules (append (list "virtio_pci"
                              "virtio_scsi")
                        %base-initrd-modules))

BTW, the VGA console is very limited, you can't select text or send
special key strokes, e.g. control keys. It suffices for activating SSH
though :-)

Hetzner added the image only for me, which is a hindrance for Guix
adoption. Another limitation is that I can't create new servers right
away without going through installation. I can dance around it by
creating a snapshot of a template server and creating the new server
from that snapshot, then reconfiguring the system (or doing a deploy, I
want to try that yet).

So, doing Guix is a little more inconvenient than a simple, plain
Debian. I can still recommend it, though you may find Hetzner not
meeting your demands in general: The cloud offerings have a rather low
cpu/memory ratio (0.25 cpu/1G RAM) and it's not configurable.

Best regards
Ellen