Installed on OVH servers by default

[ipruthi]

Got one of many servers from OVH and it was the first time I saw this software pre-installed with the Debian 9 ISO. I removed it promptly.

I don't believe this should be installed in such a way on people's servers.

OVH should know better!

These were the installed binaries:

Del ovh-rtm-metrics-toolkit 1.0.4-1 [4,160 B]
Del noderig 2.3.1-stretch [3,713 kB]
Del beamium 1.9.3-stretch [1,131 kB]
Del ovh-rtm-binaries 1.0.1 [3,863 kB]

[Videl]

Was pretty surprised seeing noderig installed on mine.. (and all the other things too)

[mikescott]

OVH, please allow us to opt-in or out of this

[eliecharra]

$ sudo du -h --max-depth=1 /opt/beamium
4.0K	/opt/beamium/sinks
12G	/opt/beamium/sources
12G	/opt/beamium

Dear OVH, the configured retention is a complete nonsense, 12G of metrics seriously ? How to you handle this on a custom disk partitioning ? Like a 20G / volume ?

/dev/md3 20G 14G 4.8G 75% / 😢

Awesome, but could you remove this kind of stuff of our server, or at least configure it properly ?

Sorry for apt-get purge beamium but we need stuff to work.

[StevenLeRoux]

Hi guys,

Thanks for reporting this. We manage this software as we're from Observability team, but I will reach the accurate team that have integrated it. It seems we need to do a better job at explaining why they're installed by default (providing batteries included with graphs and monitoring).

[grahamPegNetwork]

@StevenLeRoux
I just did a bit of googling around as I saw the user 'beamium' pop up in top, which led me here. While I don't feel like OVH is doing anything nefarious by collecting metrics, (how is it used? Is it just for my dashboard? Are there any terms governing how/why this data is collected?) I feel a bit annoyed installing a "fresh" Debian system (with the goal of being cleaner/more lightweight, and less analytics to outside compaines than Ubuntu) ...and ending up with software I didn't explicitly install running.

Call me naive, but my impression when using a (Distro) (version) image to provision a dedicated server is that I will be getting the equivalent to what I would if I downloaded an ISO from a distro's main web site. Oh, and since I see it, the apt mirrors generally make sense, I don't have a problem with that. And maybe remote console stuff, if that even needs special software. I guess it's a bit of a slippery slope.

I would like to know specifically:

1. What additional software is pre-installed on all/certain distributions
2. What purpose does each serve?
3. What information is exported, how is it stored?
4. How is this information used? Is it for our own dashboard info? Is it for generic data center analytics? Is it...sold to marketing partners...or any government that asks politely? (//tinfoil hat)

As I said before, I doubt OVH is doing anything improper with said software, but it makes me somewhat concerned and uncomfortable simply not knowing.

Thank you for your attention, hopefully you can provide a full disclosure of the points listed above, linked from the OS installation page.

[superbiche]

My whole stack nearly collapsed today because of Beamium taking 40%/80% RAM. Please remove it by default.

[superbiche]

This was with Beamium installed (and running).
Don't know how it's setup and where the performance issues are coming but on Centos 7:

sudo systemctl stop beamium
sudo systemctl disable beamium
yum remove beamium

Load average went from 60 to 0.68.

[MrDienns]

Today I had the pleasure of having my entire production environment crashing, because Beamium was using 100% of my Xeon E-2288G CPU, and 74% of my 64GB RAM. This caused processes such as iSCSI to timeout, killing my Kubernetes block storage solution, causing collateral damage and taking down everything with it. It even caused the bootloader to crash once.

This is completely unacceptable on levels I cannot express through one comment.

[wwalker]

I just got woke in the middle of the night because beamium was using all the RAM and the load avaerage was at 70!!!

Please don't install unnecessary software on the boxes.

Especially broken software, which beamium clearly is.