Getting the FreeBSD VPS ready for duty

As I mentioned in the last two posts, I have migrated a fair amount of my web hosting over to a FreeBSD VPS hosted at RootBSD and there is still some more to do. Before that could happen, I had to get the VPS from a bare installation of FreeBSD 8.2 to a state where I have a working Apache, PHP and MySQL packages. I wanted to provide a glimpse of what was done and a couple of glitches that I ran into.

The VPS that I had ordered is based on their Omicron plan, which provides two virtual processor cores, 768MB of RAM, 40GB of disk space and 500GB of data transfer. I could have gone with the Lambda plan, but I wanted a bit more RAM for when I migrate or re-do my Jabber server setup. When I placed the order, I included a special request on how IPFW is configured; beyond that, the VPS that I got was essentially stock. I received a message when the VPS was ready and I was off running.

The first thing I did was to setup all of the groups and accounts that I would need, outside of the accounts that are created by way of installing various Ports. I then sucked down the latest copy of the Ports tree and the whole source tree for RELENG_8_2. While doing that, I found that RootBSD had their own CVS mirror of the Ports tree, which made sucking down the changes a very fast affair. I created a custom kernel configuration and kicked off the whole “make world” process. I’ll spare you the boring details, as it blitzed through process without any failures.

Once all of that was done, it came down to getting MySQL installed and the key databases migrated over. I have been running MySQL 5.0 at home and hadn’t made the jump to the latest version. That’s mostly due to lack of time or having a real need to upgrade. I decided to go all the way up to 5.5, but I made an intermediate stop at 5.1 and verify that all of my applications and sites still worked. Everything was kosher and I then upgraded to 5.5 and verified that nothing was broken. At that point, I installed MySQL 5.5 on the VPS, migrated the users, databases and grants over. I also had to tweak and tune the my.cnf file to be more frugal in its memory usage.

Somewhere in that process, I noticed that the partition scheme on the VPS was not optimal (it had a relatively small /var file system). So, I created a /usr/local/var directory structure, changed the MySQL data directory by setting the “mysql_dbdir” variable in /etc/rc.conf. I had to create /usr/local/var/log/apache22 directory structure to host the Apache logs.

Both Apache 2.2 and PHP installed without any problems, but I did forget to install several PEAR packages that the WWDTM stats site requires. Oops. I started copying over the Apache and PHP configuration files over, along with the various website directories. There was a fair amount of messaging of the Apache virtual host configuration files and the various database settings.

Throughout the process, the VPS was snappy and building large Ports was about as fast as building them on my own servers. I also didn’t have any issues with network latency or with its availability. If there was any bottleneck, it was my own DSL connection. The rather slow uplink speed of my DSL circuit was the big reason for me to move my sites to a FreeBSD VPS.

Another perk with having an active plan with RootBSD is that they provide a free secondary DNS hosting service, which I decided to make use of. After copying my domain zone files to the VPS and setting up the base, jailed BIND to allow zone transfers by RootBSD’s DNS servers, I cut over DNS away from my own DNS server. I submitted the request to their Support team and got a response back within 5 minutes stating that the secondary zones have been setup. That’s very, very fast and the service process was as good as it gets.

So far, my short experience with RootBSD has been and continues to be excellent. If you are looking for a FreeBSD VPS, I would recommend considering RootBSD while researching all of the options.

FreeBSD on an HP dc7700 Desktop