vast-instance — provisioning & on-box best practices

Five defaults that turn the four recurring lease-burning failures into push-button setup. Each was hand-fixed live on a real run; codified here so the next GPU run doesn't re-pay the tax. Operate the CLI per [[vast-cli]].

0. Lease before you launch

On a shared box, acquire the cooperative lock first via your vast-lease helper's acquire command. It's ownership, not power — orthogonal to start/stop. Don't run a GPU job on a box you don't hold. Put venvs on /mnt, never root fs (root is full).

1. Bandwidth-gate the offer (≥1 Gbit)

Low-bandwidth boxes wedge on the image pull and burn the lease before the job starts. Floor: inet_down>=1000. Rank descending, take the top rentable: