Friday, 28 June 2013

What can you do with a headless server in 35 minutes?

Posted by Gary Newell  |  at  00:34 8 comments

Introduction

I was listening to the Linux Action Show series 27 episode 6 today and there was a short section about a website called Instant Server

Basically you visit the site, click create and you get access to a fully fledged Ubuntu 64-bit server. 

There is of course a catch. You get 35 minutes to use this server and basically it is headless which means that any immediate uses I could think of were negated.

Try it out

To try out Instant Server go to the site by clicking on the link and click the "Get a free server" link.






















You are given a username and password and a link to open a terminal.

Click the open terminal link and you are in.






The idea of the instant server seems like a fun one and then the obvious thought goes through your head. (well it did mine).

What can you use this for? It certainly has a good download speed but that isn't much use because it downloads to a server that will disappear within 35 minutes.

Then I thought about viewing webpages that are blocked by default at my place of work. The problem of course is the lack of X so we are now looking for a browser that works without X.


Installed by default is a text based browser called W3M and as you can see by the picture to the left it works.

This means that I can finally read those articles on LXER that get blocked at work and that I'm too tired to read at the end of the day.

This is all well and good of course if the article is mainly text based. Images provide other issues.




Another option is to download movies from youtube and maybe play them back in MPlayer. I haven't tried this yet but fully intend to. 

I like the idea of internal server but I cannot think of enough uses and this is where I am after your help. What can you do with a headless server in 35 minutes?

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8 comments:

  1. Do a sanity check for an application from obscure PPA. Kind of secure sandbox.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Install a mailserver (if it's not there yet) and send tons of spam messages. :)

      Delete
  2. I've used this service one time, and that was when I needed to check some DNS changes somewhere that was unlikely to have cached them already.

    ReplyDelete
  3. dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/xvda1

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. dd if=/dev/xvda1 of=out.img;scp out.img myserver:

      To see what they forgot erase from the unused parts.

      Delete
  4. Download files to this system. Then pull them from that system to mine. Once that is done, destroy the VM logs. Then the VM. Trace link to get the files is now broken.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Run computations (like simulation) that consume significant energy to run on local machine. A tiny way of cutting power costs.

    ReplyDelete
  6. There are a few bugs in the codes but quiet helpful for beginners. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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