BSD in the cloud

For almost 20 years now, I've had static IP addressing at home. It makes me a bit of a throwback to when the Internet was young and September only had 30 days.

I had a static address because I had a server, and servers generally need to have their addresses be well known and stable. Yes, there are dynamic DNS tricks you can use to make do, but they demand that you at least have a stable address for your DNS server, and I've never really been comfortable with the proposition.

So for a while I've had the very best DSL that PacBell/SBC/AT&T would offer, because they also offered static IP addresses for residential service. Comcast, alas, does not. And it sort of makes some sense that they wouldn't. Cable modems are optimized for relatively light upstream demands. And their terms of service discourage the sorts of uses that imply it. Comcast does offer business class services, and they do include static addresses, but that means having a separate business account for service, and they don't actually offer the fastest speeds like they do for their residential customers, and you can't take advantage of bundle pricing and on and on.

I considered getting Comcast and keeping the DSL just for the server, but that winds up being expensive, and the tiny uplink channel for the DSL complicates things like backups.

With all of the advancement in virtualization technologies, however, I decided it was finally time to set up a VPS node and retire the machine in the garage.

I decided to go with RootBSD. They support FreeBSD, and had a reasonably good setup to let you perform your own installation. This let me perform a rather advanced ZFS based configuration that is not actually supported by the current FreeBSD installer. They went the extra mile and connected up the FreeBSD installation/Live DVD image on the virtual optical drive, though normally they install via PXE booting and installing the packages via FTP.

I made a couple of missteps in my attempt at installing, but worked around it by NFS exporting my own live CD across the Internet to fix my errors and everything was fine.

If you're wondering at this point how you get to the console of the virtual machine, they provide you with a VNC based console that you can connect to. The result is no different than if you were seated in front of a physical machine. You also get a web based power switch and reset button. They set your machine up with the amount of RAM and hard disk space you're paying for and they give you graphs so you can see how much network and disk I/O and CPU your VM is using over time. If you decide to upgrade, they can attach more RAM to your VM with just a reboot, and can add extra disk space as additional disk devices.

If you have multiple machines, another feature they offer is a 2nd (virtual, of course) Ethernet interface that connects to a private network connecting all of the machines to each other, and to a SAN where they host backup storage space. Bandwidth used on this private network between your machines (and your machines and the SAN) don't count towards your monthly allowed bandwidth.

All in all, 24 hours in, it's working well. I am using ZFS snapshots for most of the backup needs, and downloading a weekly snapshot as a disaster recovery mechanism. I'll probably retain the physical hardware for a while, just in case, and should be able to recover from a disaster by using the downloaded snapshots. With the Comcast 50/10 service, the weekly backup only takes a couple hours (in the wee hours of the morning).

So far, so good.