Billing and ordering

This is kind of hell.

You need to register on their site and pay with a credit card. But you can't be from the US to order in Canada and vice-versa, which makes things pretty complicated if you want to have stuff in one country or the other.

Also, the US side of things can trip over itself and flag you as a compromised account, at which point they will ask you for a driver's license and so on. A workaround is to go on the other site.

Once you have ordered the server, they will send you a confirmation email, then another email when the order is fulfilled, with the username and password to login to the server. Next step is to setup the server.

Preparation

We assume we are creating a new server named test-01.torproject.org. You should have, at this point, received a email with the username and password. Ideally, you'd login through the web interface's console, which they call the "KVM".

1. immediately change the password so the cleartext password sent by email cannot be reused, document in the password manager

2. change the hostname on the server and in the web interface to avoid confusion:

   hostname test-01
   exec bash

   In the OVH dashboard, you need to:

   1. navigate to the "product and services" (or "bare metal cloud" then "Virtual private servers")
   2. click on the server name
   3. click on the "..." menu next to the server name
   4. choose "change name"

3. setting up reverse DNS doesn't currently work ("An error has occurred updating the reverse path."), pretend this is not a problem

4. add your SSH key to the root account

5. then follow the normal new-machine procedure, with the understanding reverse DNS is broken and that we do not have full disk encryption

In particular, you will have to:

1. reset the /etc/hosts file (with fabric works)

2. hack at /etc/resolv.conf to change the search domain

3. delete the debian account

See issue tpo/tpa/team#40904 for an example run.