If you’re like me you’ll understand, I love bargain hunting for cheap secondhand PC parts, and as such I’ve amassed modest collection of parts and Frankenstein computers. So the cost of hardware to me has never really been an issue. Obviously if you’re a gamer you’ll want decent kit, but for me I’m perfectly fine tinkering on some old sentimental Core 2 Quad builds. But what if you’re a business with a modest amount of users? We’ll fronting up tens of thousands of dollars for servers is a significant investment. Yikes! What’s the alternative? The cloud of course. For the home user I still can’t see much need for it, outside of maybe backing up files that can’t be replaced, but for enterprise, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) makes a lot of sense. Except how do we do that? Well there are the big providers that you would have heard of such Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure but they cost money, and actually I have no idea how much. However link below provides quite a long list of supposedly free options:
https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev#paas
While free options are good I recently signed for the free trial of Microsoft’ Azure, so in this post I going to give my thoughts on exploring their service for the first time!
Ok so after signing up first thing you see is a pretty slick dashboard (aka Azure Portal) with lots of options! Maybe a tab overwhelming, but I guess they want to make sure you can do everything in the cloud.
No problem, so what do I want to test? Well a Linux VM that I can remote desktop to would be a good starting point.
A quick Google search and I decide the following video is probably the fastest route –
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/videos/create-linux-virtual- machine/
Some slick dashboard action and bam I have Linux VM. And now for the crucial part I had wanted to know – so how much will this sting my hip pocket?? All right well let’s start with budget friendly but very anaemic entry hardware with a single core CPU with only 1GB of ram. This was listed as $10.23 AU per month, at the time I didn’t realise that 1GB of ram isn’t really enough though, and in actual fact this meant that base cost for a usable platform has so far proved at least be $20 AU a month. So weighing it up this is costing me more than my Netflix, so only time will tell whether I keep the service. If you’re a business however this would be just another tax deductible. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t differentiate with pricing model, which would have been nice to have for hobbyists.
So what’s next? Well my dashboard now has a platform ‘Overview’ page for my VM. This is the page that I kept coming back to to find out the basic stuff I needed, like IP addresses for logging in.
Right. Step 2 – logging in to my VM. Telnet, we all remember Telnet right? Pretty straight forward on Mac. On the ‘Overview’ you can the VM’s IP address.
Success, I’m in. Well so far so good. I don’t normally Tenlet into my PCs so time to install a desktop.
Step 3.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/use-remote-desktop
Ok so I installed ‘xrdp’, for some reason it looks different to images in the instructions, whatever.. I shan’t worry unless it becomes an issue. Now following the RDP link from the ‘Overview’ page, the link automatically downloads ‘Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for Mac’. However I did noticed that I was given a version from 2010. Never the less the connection yielded a login screen!
Well it was briefly…
And that’s why I still love computers -“Giving up, some problem”, classic.
Fast forward two hours (that part I don’t love) and it turns out that I needed edit the ‘Xwrapper.config’ file by updating the ‘allowed_users’ to be set to ‘anybody’.
https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/5-Xwrapper.config/
And that did the trick – Remote Desktop access. Only one thing to troubleshoot, not too bad, still a fairly obscure issue that may have lead some people with less patience to give up.
This is the end of the first part of my Azure ‘Cloud’ experience. In part two I’ll attempt to run my web scraping scripts and test and see if it could be a viable replacement my home PCs which run 24hrs a day.
