Managing machines

Lifecycle & states#

A machine moves through these states:

Power operations run through a per-machine queue with bounded retries. If every retry fails, the machine parks as failed, billing stops, and the team is alerted — a human looks at every such case. A machine that crashes restarts by itself, but one that keeps crashing also ends up failed and stays down until you start or restart it. Stopped machines are kept forever (zero charges) until you delete them explicitly.

How running time is billed#

Only running time bills, in whole minutes. A started minute is due in full, and the first minute is consumed the moment a machine starts.

The cap is 80% of the plan's monthly price per cycle, on a fixed 730-hour basis. Mid-cycle resizes blend it. See the monthly cap.

Web console#

The drawer's Console tab opens an SSH-backed terminal that attaches automatically. It's passwordless, because the platform dials the guest's sshd with a key held on your behalf. Resize the window freely; the PTY follows.

• The console requires owner or manage rights — view-only collaborators get a refusal.
• A machine has one console session: the drawer, the fullscreen window and the standalone page all show the same shell, live, and you can type in any of them. The terminal size follows the window you last typed in or focused.
• After 15 minutes with no typing and no output, the session closes (a countdown appears in the last minute; press any key to keep it). Reconnecting starts a fresh shell.

Resize (plan switch)#

Resize moves the machine to another plan. The new plan's rate applies from the resize minute; completed minutes seal at the old rate.

Reset root password#

The machine drawer's Settings tab can write a new root password to the config disk — generated or typed. The password is never stored by the platform. Tick reboot immediately to apply at once, otherwise the guest picks it up on next boot.

Power schedules#

Up to three power schedules per machine fire a start, stop or restart at a local wall-clock time on the weekdays you pick, in your timezone — DST never moves the fire time. Skipped occurrences count as consumed:

• A scheduled start or restart on an arrears-suspended machine skips silently — payment lifts the suspension, never the schedule.
• A scheduled start or restart on a failed machine skips too, so a crashing machine is not booted again unattended. Start it yourself once the cause is fixed; a scheduled stop still fires.
• A scheduled start with an empty wallet skips — the power-on gate applies.

Only one action fires per machine-minute; overlapping schedules are rejected at save time.

Public ports (TCP/UDP)#

The machine drawer's Network tab publishes raw TCP or UDP forwards on the node's shared public IPv4: pick the protocol and the machine's port, and a public host port is allocated automatically — the row shows host:public → :guest with a copy button. Up to 16 forwards per machine; duplicates of the same protocol+port are rejected. This is how non-web traffic reaches the machine (game servers, WireGuard, databases).

Templates can declare their ports up front, and every deploy from such a template opens them automatically. See templates.

Collaborators#

Invite collaborators by email from the machine's access controls. Machines without a grant are not_found to them.

Deleting a machine#