So I spun up another Linode instance for a SQL Server 2017 installation. I’ve had great success with six other linodes at Linode.com for a Cassandra cluster in the past, and so far this one has been just as good. The UI is very intuitive, and their price plans fit my budget … don’t need to sell body parts or sacrifice my privacy. Here is what their console looks like:
I’m not a stranger to Linux, but I started with this guide on digitalocean which worked good: initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-16-04
The guide includes ufw commands for allowing ssh through it’s firewall. Note that I’m not opening any SQL Server ports and I’ll be tunneling SQL Server ports inside of ssh. This should help minimize the chance of this server becoming a slammer host.
I also tried some sneaky stuff to get SQL Server to install on a really cheap 1GB host with mount -t tmpfs to sneak around the minimum RAM specs, but I wound up crashing the host:
Out of memory: Kill process 18260 ((sd-pam)) score 1 or sacrifice child
Killed process 18260 ((sd-pam)) total-vm:61940kB, anon-rss:1692kB, file-rss:0kBB