u/poulain_ght

Linux is an operating system! Something you slap onto a computer for it to work!

I realize only now that this community is what many have been yearning for! The twink heaven was just gate kept by computer science terms and not accessible through conventional browsing!

I never saw a post about it on mpmd, so maybe I am divulging an already known but well kept secret!

Anyway I am convinced those two community can overflow love one into another!

I hope this reaches my fellow autistic and tren riders 😘

Keyboards were always meant to be shared.

Don't bust nuts alone between your halves, share the keyboard with your half 😉

Yoooo! guys!

I like how nixos can create VM declaratively, and I know you like it too!

However I often need to spin disposable machines with network connectivity for testing, deployment or some work that require isolation, and then keep it running or trash it out!

Soooo, I thought I could just put the essential of my configuration (bash/fish/ network utis... for seamless integration) into one of this nice disk images created by nixos-rebuild / nixos-generators disko and the likes.

And then spawn a ton of them by pressing enter, arrow up, enter,.. 😄

And by any means attach the VM to a term and use it with all the comfort in the world as it is a clone of the host (tooling wise).

It took some time, and the work is forever ongoing, you know the drill, but I finally came up with a cli that does the job!

https://github.com/crocuda/virshle

I absolutely enjoy using it! (and even made a VPS based on the thing)

BUUUT, I am also worried this might be solution to a problem most nixers don't have or already have a solution for! What's yours if any?

tl;dr

OP made a hosting provider to sustain the development of a libvirt alternative, but feel obligated to give circumvoluted details.

A few years ago,

I was deploying websites with some CI/CD solutions.

But they were so few that were not freemium, cloud basedor just sucked the life out of my computer,

that I made the bases for a rust CI/CD tool [pipelight](https://github.com/pipelight/pipelight).

To sustain its development, I wanted to create a server-side paying service based on this software.

But it felt short when I stumbled upon the intricacies of hosting.

Thank God, NixOs was one side of the coin, declarativity, reproducibility... you know the drill.

Nonetheless, the action of renting remote computing resources was lacking the brevity I had newly found.

For long, server hosting rentability has been the driving force behind a general stillness and lack of novelty.

Consequently, I chose the path to self-hosting; no middleman involved, only dreams and possibilities.

But here again I was displeased with the state of current virtualization software.

It was time to cook! (fuck! not agaaain!)

Time to cook a modern virtual machine manager.

The documentation for [virshle](https://github.com/pipelight/pipelight) is still in rework after these last months of heavy refactoring, but the software is pretty much alive.

As a demonstration let me introduce [crocuda_vps](https://crocuda.com),

I took my shot at making something a bit specialized to sustain the growth of this homemade solution.

It is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting provider, based on open source virtualization and open source network tooling.

(I own the servers that I collocate in datacenter)

I fell in love with FOSS freedom a long time ago and wish to give back at least a fraction of what have been given.

My hope is to drive fresh blood into FOSS, freedom and privacy tools with this new service.

This is the service 2nd release!

I have taken into account every criticism and spent last 4 months fixing bugs.

This is how it works:

- You order and manage your virtual machines from the terminal over a ssh connection:

```sh

ssh -6 crocuda.com

```

- New accounts have free credits for you to try the thing.

It only supports NixOs as it is only the only distribution that makes it maintainable for a single man without losing sanity.

I knew it would take time.

But here we finally are.

Hope it reaches some of you who need it.