ALERT Fool Me THRICE: CloudAtCost

[Dave Gray]

Yeah, I still have a couple of boxen on there. They offered a one-time upgrade to v3 w/ no yearly cost, for a pretty cheap price. What amazes me is the 2 machines I set up are just running and running (never had an uptime of more than 2 weeks before...)
DO NOT start with a plain Centos 7 build, you *cannot* do a yum upgrade - it dies midway and leaves the system half updated and yum in a terminal mess. I started w/ a 7.5 build and got Incredible PBX 2020 running -- after puzzling out the missing pieces Ward mentioned above.
Probably have 60-70$ invested over the last 4 years or so. No ongoing charge, so if they disappear, so be it.

 

[AndyInNYC]

Gotta love CloudAtCost for honeypots. 624 failed SSH logins in the 2 hours it took to set up this PBX.

My DigitalOcean machine has 3815 banned IPs in it's sshd jail over the last 6 weeks
My flipperhost email server has 6281 over a 1 year period
A second flipperhost server has 8955 over a 9 month period
and finally, a 3 month old machine at flipperhost has 2353 bans in 3 weeks

Pity we can't send a virtual torpedo back up the pipe to blow up the 'pirates'. If you can write this as a commercial FreePBX module, I'll pay - you don't even need to make it opensource.

Andrew

 

[mbellot]

So can anyone enlighten me about the difference(s) between V3 and V4? Not real surprising, there is nothing to be found on their website...

I just received an email offering an "upgrade" to V4 for $1. Hardly seems worth the CC fees (for them), but I would like to know what I'm getting in to before I do anything.

I current have a DC2 and DC3 (six total vCPUs) that I am using to run six very basic systems. I do not want to lose the ability to create six VMs, and the DC4 description only states "IPv4/6 public IP" (singular), which makes me wonder if I would end up with two systems total (one 2 vCPU, one 4 vCPU).

 

[Dave Gray]

Actually, that's $1 per CPU - it would cost you $6 for the upgrade. My guess, is they just want to stop supporting multiple platforms, so they make the upgrade real cheap.

 

[wardmundy]

We jumped on v4 because the platform is becoming next to worthless without it... and pretty worthless even with it.

Turns out that with v4 there is no OS image for CentOS 7 or Debian 10. Here's how to build the Debian 10.7 image from their Debian 9 image:

sed -i 's/stretch/buster/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
apt update
apt upgrade -y
apt full-upgrade -y
apt --purge autoremove

speedtest is pretty impressive (apt install speedtest-cli):

speedtest

Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 859.19 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 544.17 Mbit/s

No current way to backrev CentOS 8 to 7, but I've opened a ticket. Should hear something within a few months.

 

[hawk#1]

Should hear something within a few months.

Unless they just close the ticket which they have a history of doing

 

[mbellot]

We jumped on v4 because the platform is becoming next to worthless without it... and pretty worthless even with it.

Worthless is a matter of perspective and need.

If I can spin up some pretty basic Ubuntu+Apache VMs then it's "good enough" for me.

For $6 I guess it's not much to lose if it ends up being a throw away.

 

[mbellot]

Unless they just close the ticket which they have a history of doing

I've never had one closed without some sort of (eventual) communication.

They are not lightning fast, but I've had all of my tickets responded to, if not actually resolved.

 

[wardmundy]

They actually responded promptly to my inquiry about CentOS 7 and Debian 10 images. They said they would be available later this week. So... I guess we'll see. And, I agree with you that C@C is suitable for sandboxes, but I'd never recommend their platform for production use.

 

[wardmundy]

CentOS 7.9 image is now available. Testing now.

Only 75 failed login attempts while I ate my lunch after Phase I install completed.

Incredible PBX 2020 is good to go on CloudAtCost. Have a verrrrry long lunch for Phase 2.

 

[hawk#1]

I've never had one closed without some sort of (eventual) communication.

They are not lightning fast, but I've had all of my tickets responded to, if not actually resolved.

if you consider getting an email saying the ticket was closed as communication you are correct. This happened multiple times before I finally got in touch with someone in management. To be fair, I will also state that I have not needed to open a ticket there in the past 2 years. Maybe they finally realized during this time what they were doing wrong and have corrected their mistakes.

 

[mbellot]

So I've decided to torture myself a little more with CaC and figured the residents here might be able to lessen the pain (slightly anyway).

Has anyone dabbled with the post build scripts? I've searched the net some and come up mostly dry, but it's possible I haven't hit the correct set of search terms yet.

I have found there are a handful of things I do to every server I spin up regardless of it's actual purpose, so I thought it would be nice to have it happen as part of the build process instead of a manual after step.

I have the internal mechanics of the actual script down (creating directories/files, updating certain things, etc), but what I can't figure out is how to actually get the script to run as part of the build process. I've uploaded it, pointed the build function to the script and kicked off a build, but once the server is up it has none of the custom stuff completed.

Does anyone have a simple script they can point to as an example and the specific steps needed to get that script to run as part of the build process?

 

[jaminmc]

If you don't want to depend on Cloud@cost's shady images, Install almost any OS using https://wiki.eddyn.net/CloudAtCost_Custom_OS

I highly recommend doing this on almost any cloud provider that isn't big like DigitalOcean...

 

[pbxhq]

I don't understand the obsession with failed login attempts? Use SSH keys to login, disable password authentication, and you are good to go.

If someone with bad intentions discovers a block of IPs is known to have linux servers accessible by SSH, they are likely to attempt to brute force in to servers in that range. I would love for someone to fill me in on how this is in any way the server providers fault.

 

[pbxfreeck]

If you don't want to depend on Cloud@cost's shady images, Install almost any OS using https://wiki.eddyn.net/CloudAtCost_Custom_OS

I highly recommend doing this on almost any cloud provider that isn't big like DigitalOcean...

I tested on CloudPRO v4 but got a response that it does not find the netboot.xyz.lkrn file even though it is located in the boot directory. There is some solution because I always have problems with clean server installations on CaC.

 

[jaminmc]

I tested on CloudPRO v4 but got a response that it does not find the netboot.xyz.lkrn file even though it is located in the boot directory. There is some solution because I always have problems with clean server installations on CaC.

Yea, The script on there fails, because of the https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/generic-ipxe.lkrn does not exist...

But the cd /boot && wget -c "https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz.lkrn" works, and once you reboot, press the ESC key until you see a Grub menu, then press the letter C

after that type in linux16 /boot/netboot.xyz.lkrn, then boot

Tip: type in linux16 , then /bo then TAB, and it should complete /boot/, then type in ne TAB, and it should complete the rest.... If it still doesn't see it, try just linux16 /netboot.xyz.lkrn

The instructions do inded work with Ubuntu 18.04 image on V4... Just did it now.

 

[wardmundy]

@jaminmc: linux16 /netboot.xyz.lkrn worked for me at CloudAtCost. Extremely tedious process frankly. I've been wrestling it for well over an hour, and I'm about half way through the Ubuntu 20.04 install. MORAL: CloudAtCost is still a giant POS.

 

[jaminmc]

@jaminmc: linux16 /netboot.xyz.lkrn worked for me at CloudAtCost. Extremely tedious process frankly. I've been wrestling it for well over an hour, and I'm about half way through the Ubuntu 20.04 install. MORAL: CloudAtCost is still a giant POS.

Yes, You have to select the Legacy installer for 20,04. Also, having to manually type in the IP address's is a PITA. I don't trust their images as far as I can throw them!!!

It is also a Good idea to install the OpenVmware tools after your install...

sudo apt update
sudo apt install open-vm-tools

 

[pbxfreeck]

THX it working.

Yea, The script on there fails, because of the https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/generic-ipxe.lkrn does not exist...

But the cd /boot && wget -c "https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz.lkrn" works, and once you reboot, press the ESC key until you see a Grub menu, then press the letter C

after that type in linux16 /boot/netboot.xyz.lkrn, then boot

Tip: type in linux16 , then /bo then TAB, and it should complete /boot/, then type in ne TAB, and it should complete the rest.... If it still doesn't see it, try just linux16 /netboot.xyz.lkrn

The instructions do inded work with Ubuntu 18.04 image on V4... Just did it now.

THX it working.