6 ms·

It's a shame the popular VPS providers, like Linode and DigitalOcean, don't support easy installations of FreeBSD (and other BSDs). Does anyone know of trustwor

by vmsp 6y ago

It's a shame the popular VPS providers, like Linode and DigitalOcean, don't support easy installations of FreeBSD (and other BSDs). Does anyone know of trustworthy hosting solutions that make things easy?

octotoad 6y ago
DO has supported FreeBSD for years now.
- kevans91 6y ago
  Yeah, this... though it'd be awesome if they updated their setup for working ZFS boot environments OOTB. Last I checked they were setting vfs.root.mountfrom explicitly in /boot/loader.conf.local, which is not stellar. =-(
dijit 6y ago
Used FreeBSD on Vultr for nearly 5 years at this point. It works, they used to have issues with DHCP services, but that would have been linux too. It seems to be resolved now.
trasz 6y ago
How about AWS? Creating FreeBSD instance is trivially easy.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  This seems to be largely due to the efforts of Colin Percival. [0] Have to know where to find the AMIs though. [1] Amazon doesn't make this as easy as they might. [0] https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva [1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cloud/2019-February/000200.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cloud/2019-Febru...
  - cperciva 6y ago
    I'm missing something here. We have lists of AMIs in every release announcement, and FreeBSD is also in the AWS Marketplace. (Also, for the automation nerds, there's an SNS notification which goes out every time we publish new AMIs.) What would you like to see changed?
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      I wasn't very clear: the way the AWS Marketplace wants me to 'buy' the AMI for $0 is an annoying extra step. You're doing the right thing on your side, publishing the AMI IDs plainly, the way Ubuntu do. [0] The AMI IDs work fine in EC2 even without 'buying', if you already know them, so it makes little sense for Amazon to artificially introduce this $0 payment step, in the name of it being a 'marketplace'. While we're here: As I implied, I recently got FreeBSD up and running from one of your AMIs. (I was just playing around, not doing anything serious, and I don't know FreeBSD well at all, my experience is with Linux.) Thanks for your work here. I encountered two issues though: 1. It took a long time for the instance to boot up and for port 22 to open. Roughly 14 minutes. This is with a t3a.small instance. 2. I was unable to confirm the SSH public key of the instance. The EC2 custom is for it to be written to the system log, which is viewable from within the EC2 web dashboard, but FreeBSD didn't appear to do this. (This can take a few minutes on Ubuntu and Amazon Linux 2, for whatever reason, but it works eventually.) Also, and perhaps it's just me that trips over this, but I'd find it helpful if it were made more explicit that the correct username is 'ec2-user'. I haven't tried out the ARM64 AMIs but it's great you're providing AMIs for both architectures. Amazon seem pretty serious about their ARM instance-types. [0] https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/ https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/
vogon_laureate 6y ago
I've got several FreeBSD droplets on Digital Ocean. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-started-with-freebsd https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-...

by vmsp 6y ago

octotoad 6y ago

DO has supported FreeBSD for years now.

kevans91 6y ago
Yeah, this... though it'd be awesome if they updated their setup for working ZFS boot environments OOTB. Last I checked they were setting vfs.root.mountfrom explicitly in /boot/loader.conf.local, which is not stellar. =-(

dijit 6y ago

Used FreeBSD on Vultr for nearly 5 years at this point. It works, they used to have issues with DHCP services, but that would have been linux too. It seems to be resolved now.

trasz 6y ago

How about AWS? Creating FreeBSD instance is trivially easy.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
This seems to be largely due to the efforts of Colin Percival. [0] Have to know where to find the AMIs though. [1] Amazon doesn't make this as easy as they might. [0] https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva [1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cloud/2019-February/000200.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cloud/2019-Febru...
- cperciva 6y ago
  I'm missing something here. We have lists of AMIs in every release announcement, and FreeBSD is also in the AWS Marketplace. (Also, for the automation nerds, there's an SNS notification which goes out every time we publish new AMIs.) What would you like to see changed?
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I wasn't very clear: the way the AWS Marketplace wants me to 'buy' the AMI for $0 is an annoying extra step. You're doing the right thing on your side, publishing the AMI IDs plainly, the way Ubuntu do. [0] The AMI IDs work fine in EC2 even without 'buying', if you already know them, so it makes little sense for Amazon to artificially introduce this $0 payment step, in the name of it being a 'marketplace'. While we're here: As I implied, I recently got FreeBSD up and running from one of your AMIs. (I was just playing around, not doing anything serious, and I don't know FreeBSD well at all, my experience is with Linux.) Thanks for your work here. I encountered two issues though: 1. It took a long time for the instance to boot up and for port 22 to open. Roughly 14 minutes. This is with a t3a.small instance. 2. I was unable to confirm the SSH public key of the instance. The EC2 custom is for it to be written to the system log, which is viewable from within the EC2 web dashboard, but FreeBSD didn't appear to do this. (This can take a few minutes on Ubuntu and Amazon Linux 2, for whatever reason, but it works eventually.) Also, and perhaps it's just me that trips over this, but I'd find it helpful if it were made more explicit that the correct username is 'ec2-user'. I haven't tried out the ARM64 AMIs but it's great you're providing AMIs for both architectures. Amazon seem pretty serious about their ARM instance-types. [0] https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/ https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/

vogon_laureate 6y ago

I've got several FreeBSD droplets on Digital Ocean. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-started-with-freebsd https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-...