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.

About seven years ago, I wrote my first article for Dæmon News about my experiences of installing FreeBSD on a Compaq iPaq desktop which would become my web and mail server for about six years.

About a month ago, I purchased a pre-owned HP dc7700 Small Form Factor desktop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.86GHz, 2GB of RAM and came with an 80GB SATA-II hard drive. I decided to purchase a new hard drive, a Seagate Barracuda ES 250GB SATA-II hard drive and keep the 80GB drive untouched. Since the system had quite a bit of processing power and resources, I decided to not only replace my aging web and mail server, but also to consolidate internal network services on to the new system.

While waiting for the desktop to arrive, I downloaded snapshots of both FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT and 6.2-STABLE in both i386 and amd64 variants. Once the system arrived, a problem I ran into while setting up the system was that the BIOS would not allow me to set the SATA controller to AHCI and therefore would lose out on a couple of nice-to-have features. Once the hardware portion was ready, I decided to install 7.0-CURRENT/amd64 but ran into a nice little error: panic: No BIOS smap info from loader

I then tried to install the snapshot of 6.2-STABLE/amd64 and ran into the same error. I did the usual troubleshooting steps of going through the BIOS to disable any odd features and disabled vPro to no avail. So in slight desperation, I decided to install the latest snapshot of 6.2-STABLE/i386 and did not encounter any errors or stability issues during the install process.

Unfortunately, since I needed to get the machine ready in a hurry, I did not get a chance to try 7.0-CURRENT/i386. At some point, I’ll move to 7.0 once it has been released and deemed fairly stable by the community.

After getting FreeBSD installed with a base set of packages (vim, Python, Perl 5.8, sudo and screen) and used csup to fetch the latest Ports and Source trees, I went through and built a custom kernel configuration file to disable devices that I know are not built into the motherboard and added DEVICE_POLLING for the built-in Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller. Once I created a custom /etc/make.conf file, I went through the whole “make world” process, running mergemaster and rebooted, the system came back up without any problems. At that point, I also decided to modify /etc/login.conf to use UTF-8 for everything instead of the default. The reason was to finally be able to really look at non-Latin characters in e-mails and other files. I also changed the password hashing to Blowfish, since I had already done that with my other FreeBSD systems.

Over the course of the following week, I went through installing all of the packages running on my then-current web and mail server, copying the configuration files and content over, and testing everything. After making sure everything was working, I set aside a Saturday to cut over to the new system and start using it as a production system. It took a little while for everything to swing over cleanly, but no critical errors or problems occured.

After the new system had been running smoothly for over a week, I backed up all of the critical data from my old server and powered off the old system completely. Next was to finish the consolidation of DHCP, DNS and NTP for the internal network so that I could decommission my Sun Blade 100… but that’s another story.

So far, the desktop system has been solid and have been experimenting with it more and more. For instance, while messing with the idea of running musicpd on it, I found out that the snd_hda driver works with the integrated HD Audio controller. On the flip side, any attempts to use SMBus or SMBIOS on the system to get temperature or fan speed reading using mbmon have lead to disappointment. mbmon would complain about not finding any hardware monitoring device and promptly exits.

I also have put the integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller to the test after getting an 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and mounting NFS shares from my file server (which has two Gigabit Ethernet ports). Without Jumbo Frames, the throughput was decent and processor usage during large transfers was somewhat high.

At the end of the day, the HP dc7700 has made for a very nice personal web and mail server, mostly for the price that I got for it.