Larrikin - A Toy Cloud for Self

[Russell Allen]

All the cool kids have a cloud, so we should have one too!

Announcing LARRIKIN.ORG - the Self cloud (tada!)

NBAQ: (Never Before Asked Questions)
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* What is it?

A cluster of Linux images which you can run Self snapshots on. When I say cluster, I mean two, currently small instances on Digital Ocean. Each Linux instance can run multiple Self worlds. A coodinator at https://manager.larrikin.org keeps track of stuff. It is much simpler than the big clouds but also has obvious drawbacks. 

* How does it work?

You go to https://manager.larrikin.org and sign up, then you can upload, download, wake, sleep, delete etc snapshots.  You will need the secret Self mailing list invitation: "ourselves"

* How do I interact with my running Self world?

You can interact with the stdin/stdout of your Self world through the manager. Also, if you run a webserver in your Self world on port 8000 then it will be exposed the web on port 80 of http://worldname.username.larrikin.org <http://worldname.username.larrikin.org/> I’m working on allowing people to point other domain names to their worlds. 

* Why didn't you just use OpenStack/Docker/Puppet/CoreOS/Mesos/Vagrant/Zookeeper

I don't even know what these things are but they sound fiendlishly complex. Seriously though, cluster of two machines, remember?  Some of these might become relevant if I end up trying to run many many snapshots over many instances. I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me, so I've tried to keep moving parts to a minimum. Current moving parts are: Self, Centos 7, DigitalOcean, Amazon Route 53, nginx, FireJail and a very little python.

* Larrikin.org?

Shug. I happened to have the domain name. I'll move it to something better in due course.

* For the love of all that is good and holy, why?

To meet the large un-met demand for cloud hosting of Self snapshots, of course!

Ground Rules:
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I. Your running worlds are in a sandbox and shouldn't be able to do anything harmful. Please try and let me know if you succeed in breaking anything!

II. The system may restart your running worlds at any time without warning, so if you are running, for example, a webserver make sure it starts up when the snapshot starts.

III. If you save your snapshot the system should keep track of the change. 

IV. If you look around you will see your snapshot is able to read and write files to disk. These files will disappear every snapshot restart so don't rely on them.

V. Even with very small TTL values, DNS sometimes takes time to propogate so if your webserver isn’t immediately available that is probably why. 

VI. This is just for fun! Don't do anything which you care too much about without talking to me first because as far as I know the code has a bug which will send all your data to the NSA, eat all your snapshots, then burn down the data centre.

VIII. Please please USE A UNIQUE PASSWORD to access the system. That way when the hackers break in they won't be able to use that password on your Top Secret Important Account.

:) Russell


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