[BSD] Get a free KVM VPS to play with! And write about it II.

First part here:

[BSD] Get a free KVM VPS to play with! And write about it. 

Basically, I wanna write an update.

It's been some time since first article,  and honestly, I am a bit surprised that only 2 people are interested. I was expecting more people (634 views of article so far). But that's not the end of the world. 

Right now I am gonna write to the people and I will decide which one will be first. I think I can give them up to 2 months or so. We all have personal life so we shall see. 

First person wants to write about BSD for begginers, the second wanna write about some benchmarks and so. So both looks good to me. If you think you can beat them, let me know and VPS is yours ;]

I'll keep you updated.

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[BSD] Get a free KVM VPS to play with! And write about it.

So it goes like this:  some time ago I bought kinda cheap KVM VPS package:

System RAM:     1024 MB
System Disk:     30 GB
CPU Cores:     3 Cores
Bandwidth:    2 TB

You can find more if you will search this blog. KVM tag should be enough.

I hoped to learn something about BSD while playing, but I moved for internship to India and somehow never have time for that (net only at work and so...).


So I wanna give to someone. For some time. Or more people, in fact. So they can save the world with it, or that kind of stuff...



And in exchange: 

you would write for DiscoverBSD what you were doing with it. And yeah, should be something with BSDs.

How?

Well, I guess you can write what would you do in the comments and according to what I think is acceptable and doable, I will pick some people and we shall do it ;]  And community will help me with deciding which people I can trust.

Basically, I would give you VNC access (and other infos like IP addresses) and set ISO file with some BSD and then it's all yours.

And yeah, it's from BlueVM company, so all needs to be according to their rules. If what you wanna do is not acceptable by their policies, then it's no do.


And please spread the word!

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BSD News 21/01/14

Last week in BSD
Releases: m0n0wall, pfSense
Other news: BSDnow, portmgr@, OpenBSD, ruBSD, DragonFly BSD, PC-BSD

Follow us at Twitter at @janhovancik. Read interview with new writer.

Releases

m0n0wall 1.8.1 released 

Change log highlights (see the SVN change log for the full details):

• add scheduler ("Croen") service with many different job types (enable/disable interface or shaper rule, Wake on LAN, reboot, reconnect WAN, execute command etc.)
• improved IPv6 support, including IPsec, DHCPv6-PD, RDNSS and DNSSL, and NDP info on the ARP diagnostic page
• major overhaul of wireless LAN support. On some cards, it is now also possible to create multiple APs at the same time. To reflect this change, the wireless settings have moved to the Interfaces: assign page, where WLAN subinterfaces can be created much like for VLANs.
• DNS forwarder: add option to log DNS queries, add aliases (CNAMEs) and MXs
• Add AES-256, SHA-256/384/512 and additional DH group options to IPsec
• Make rule moving and deletion on shaper rules page work like for firewall rules.
• Initial support for USB modems
• enable CPU hardware crypto support
• automatically reassign available physical network interfaces if none of the assigned interfaces in the configuration can be found on the system (i.e. for a new installation, or when moving an existing config to new hardware)
• the "embedded" image is gone; generic-pc-serial should now be used for PC Engines and Soekris boards
• console speed for serial images is fixed to 9600 baud (no longer tries to use BIOS preset value)
• introduction of an automated build system that allows one to build m0n0wall from scratch with almost no manual intervention on a standard FreeBSD 8.4 system
• countless bug fixes and improvements in UI and system configuration code

Refer to the installation instructions for information on how to install these files on the various platforms.

pfSense 2.1.1-PRERELEASE Snapshots Available

For those who are inclined to try such things, 2.1.1-PRERELEASE snapshots are up for testing at http://snapshots.pfsense.org/

Update URLs for use in firmware update settings:
http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_8_3/amd64/pfSense_RELENG_2_1/.updaters/
http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_8_3/i386/pfSense_RELENG_2_1/.updaters/

The current set of builds have the new Intel drivers for em/igb/ixgb/ixgbe (Thanks Ermal!) and should support i210 and i354 and others, and should hopefully fix issues that have been observed with ixgb/ixgbe drivers.

Give them a spin, especially if you have hardware that could benefit from the new drivers.

A list of changes between 2.1 and 2.1.1 may be found here:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/2.1.1_New_Features_and_Changes

Other news

Bhyve Mind | BSD Now 20 

download (size: 502 MB )

It’s our big 20th episode! We’re going to sit down for a chat with Neel Natu and Peter Grehan, the developers of bhyve. Not familiar with bhyve? Our tutorial will show you all you need to know about this awesome new virtualization technology. Answers to your questions and all the latest news, here on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

pfSense talk at “Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyokai” February 17 

Isaac (.ike) Levy, Senior Unix System Administrator at National Hockey League (http://www.linkedin.com/in/dotike) will be presenting “pfSense Practical Experiences: from home routers, to High-Availability Datacenter Deployments” at the Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyokai (FreeBSD Study Session) Group on February 17, 2014.
http://atnd.org/events/47084
Ike states that his main objective in Tokyo is to get some real help with the Japanese translation of pfSense.
Ike recently committed “Phase 1″ (machine translation) of this effort, which you can view at GitHub.

Joe Marcus Clarke has stepped down 

Joe Marcus Clarke, aka marcus@, has stepped down from his duties on the FreeBSD Ports Management Team.
Joe was our longest serving member of the team. Among his many accomplishments was being the repocopy source of authority, instrumental in championing tinderbox development and maintaining portlint.
On behalf of the Ports Management team, we would like to thank Joe for his many years of service and dedication.
Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

ruBSD: interviews with Theo and Henning

Last December Russian tech giant Yandex organised first ruBSD event in Moscow. OpenBSD developers Theo de Raadt, Henning Brauer and Mike Belopuhov gave three talks on different topics. There were interviews with Theo and Henning recorded as well. Theo spoke about current adoption of mitigation techniques in other OSes and state of OpenBSD project. Henning gave a history overview of PF.
All talks and interviews available online and for download.
Theo de Raadt: Exploit Mitigation Techniques: an Update After 10 Years (slides, video and interview)
Henning Brauer: OpenBSD's pf: Design, Implementation and Future (slides, video and interview)
Mike Belopuhov: OpenBSD: Where is crypto headed? (slides and video)

32-bit DragonFly 3.7 and dports 

There are no binary packages built for dports, on DragonFly 3.7, for 32-bit machines, at this time.  Pierre Abbat found this out.  You can build from source, of course, or just use 3.6 packages.  Don’t forget -DBATCH to avoid getting asked for build options when building from source.


Code stuff
DragonFly BSD - Other network improvements 
DragonFly BSD - Trackpad support summary 
DragonFly BSD - Testing USB4BSD 
DragonFly BSD - ACPI updates and power states 
FreeBSD security advisories
PC-BSD Weekly Feature Digest 
In Other BSDs for 2014/01/18


Interesting articles
Hal, dbus, and VMWare tip. Also pkg locking 
BlueVM KVM and NetBSD I. 
Unix: Writing more efficient shell scripts

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BlueVM KVM and NetBSD I.

"NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent for use in both production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a large and vivid international community. Many applications are readily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection." » Learn more


"BlueVM (affiliate link) is dedicated to offering low cost, high quality Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Our VPS come with your choice of OS distribution, control panel and software. We strive to maintain fast servers, friendly support and no downtime.Our hardware consists of primarily Intel E3-1240 @ 3.4GHz with 32 GB of RAM and 4 x 1 or 2 TB RAID10 Hard Drives. All of our hardware runs on a minimum dedicated connection speed of 1Gbps."

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BSD KVM VPS - Feathur control panel settings

So second part of series is here. You might wanna read first part here to know what's going on in here.

So title says:  Feathur control panel settings

Right, BlueVM (affiliate link) created their own control panel, because they had some security issues with 3th party ones. But that's not the reason why I wanna write about it. The reason is something I mentioned in previous post: they let you change some settings. So that would be the first step - understand what it means.

So paste from previous part:

Network cards: 
realtek 8139
Intel (recommended)
VirtIO
realtek 8029
PCNet

Disk driver:
SCSI
IDE (recommended)
VirtIO


Pretty much this goes easy. I mean research. Kinda.

The best results I should be able to get with VirtIO. What I mean with "kinda" is that it works like that with Linux. With BSD reports vary. Depending on what OS and what version.

So yeah, I am gonna try most of BSD distros and do some tests.

What kind of test would you recommend? I asked on Google+ BSD community but didn't get a lot of ideas.

I installed FreeBSD 9.2 with SCSI driver and Realtek, but both download speed and disk results were bad. Don't remember them, but no matter, I will write about it later.

I decided to install OpenBSD first and then do tests with FreeBSD when 10 is out. Because installing software with FreeBSD ports is not that fun one would thought.

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BSD KVM VPS - Let's play

I did write some time ago how I wanna learn BSD, and that's the reason why I am writing this blog. And that I wasn't successful with running any BSD on my spare laptop (for whatever reasons).

And I also got interested in VPS. I bought one (3euro/yr) and I wrote the website about it (because I wanna learn web-dev stuff, too). And that got me into looking into many website with cheap unmanaged VPS deals and so. Few days ago I found one interesting offer: 1GB RAM unmanaged KVM VPS for less than 30 bucks a year. 

KVM is the way to run BSD OS, right? And this one is pretty cheap. Yeah, let's get one!

I checked reviews of company, and it looked good, so I went for it.

Details?

It comes from BlueVM (affliate link).

• 1GB RAM
• 3 CPU Cores
• 30GB Disk space
• 2TB Bandwidth
• 1Gbps uplink
• 1x IPv4 address
• KVM/Feathur
• $29.95/Year

I also used 10% Off code so in the end I am gonna pay $26,96 USD a year. To compare, without this special offer, the price is $7.50 USD a month. Ah, yeah, that's why I bought it.

Location is Buffalo, NY, USA.

So?

So I need your help. I bet I can find a lot of readers having more experience than me (as mine is zero). I can always use some advice.

What BSDs they offer to install? 

They have:

FreeBSD 9.2
pfSense 2.1 LiveCD
OpenBSD 5.4
NetBSD 6.1.2

I can also use my own ISO, if I open a ticket with link to location.

So no DragonFly and others.

Other things?

I can change some settings:

Network cards: 
realtek 8139
Intel (recommended)
VirtIO
realtek 8029
PCNet

Disk driver:
SCSI
IDE (recommended)
VirtIO


So my questions to readers?

Which OS do you recommend to use? 32 or 64? 
Which setting would you pick?
Ideas?

What I wanna do with this VPS is learn. I will probably install server and some database and do some pet project. Might be some Rails or so.

Sure, I will write about whatever I will do. There will be a lot that I will discover when doing stuff...

I guess I will start with comparing features of BSDs, but go ahead, help me figure out and make some comments!

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