[Discuss] Debian 12 in the Cloud

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

I've been playing with commercial VMs the last few days. First playing 
with Digital Ocean, then playing with Linode.

I like Linode better.

First, their "Debian 12" seems closer to the real Debian 12 than is 
Digital Ocean's. Also, though Linode's cheapest VM ($5/month) is a 
little more expensive than is Digital Ocean's ($4/month), it seems a 
better deal:

- Twice the RAM: 1 GiB vs. 512 MiB.

I'm annoyed that a headless machine, not running any web browsers, needs 
so much RAM, but I ran into problems with 512 MiB when just setting 
things up: running emacs, installing packages? And why does systemd 
think it needs to be a whole damn OS in and of itself? It is a pig. And 
it is complex making, it a security risk. (Yes, I blame systemd for the 
xz security breach that nearly backdoored sshd all over the internet. 
No, systemd should *not* be patching other code, certainly not sshd. Grrr.)

- Two-and-a half times the disk: 25 GB vs 10 GB. I don't need much, but 
more is good.

- Twice the data in/out budget. Not that I need much, but more is good.

But mostly, I want my VM to be able to send me logwatch e-mails, and 
Digital Ocean proudly blocks outbound port 25! Linode, on the other 
hand, posts instructions for how to run an e-mail server.


-kb, the Kent who wants to finish setting things up, and then turning 
off an old VM, before the next billing happens in a couple days.