unrelenting.technology

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Tag #vps

Scalewayโ€™s ARM64 VPS has been successfully depenguinated! :) Now you can run FreeBSD on four ThunderX cores, 2GB RAM and 50GB SSD for 3โ‚ฌ/month. Awesome!

Also, in the process, I finally discovered the cause of GPT partitions sometimes disappearing on reboot. It was the size of the partition table. Itโ€™s 128 by default, but sometimes itโ€™s not โ€” e.g. on the FreeBSD installer memstick image, itโ€™s 2. Creating a third partition with gpart โ€œsucceededโ€, but the partition disappeared on reboot.

Quake Champions is awesome (as in the gameplay โ€” performance is meh).

Amazon Web Services is not awesome: it wasn't really obvious that promotional credits aren't spent on reserved EC2 instances :( Also HardenedBSD was behaving weird on it (secadm kernel panic, Python libssl segfaults).

But with regular FreeBSD I've set up a Matrix homeserver (Synapse) on EC2! I am now @greg:unrelenting.technology :) It's working as my new IRC bouncer, so with that I've been able to say goodbye to the previous VPS that served this website (which was still running my ZNC).

Three days ago, I received an email from DigitalOcean. They said that they were doing some maintenance and my VPS, the one that currently runs this website, will be rebooted soon. I didnโ€™t pay much attention to that.

Today, I wanted to look at my websiteโ€ฆ and it didnโ€™t open. The server didnโ€™t even respond to ping. Yes, yes, I should use a service that monitors my stuff, I know. Few people care about my website though :D

So I rebooted the server, went to the DigitalOcean VNC console, logged inโ€ฆ as a regular user that canโ€™t sudo. Becuase For Securityโ„ข, my sudoer account does not have a password. Only authorized SSH keys. Fuck.

The solution was to use the JavaScript devtools to automate typing the ssh key into the console and ssh to localhost as the regular user. The script was suggested by someone on DigitalOceanโ€™s support site. I had to modify it a little to work with newlines. However, mistakes were introduced: some letters ended up as lowercase instead of uppercase or vice versa. After getting in as a sudoer, I was able to set up networking.

The actual problem? bsd-cloudinit didnโ€™t work because a symlink in /etc/rc.digitalocean.d was broken, and as a result, the network settings were not set.

Iโ€™d say that the actual actual problem is the use of cloud-init stuff instead of, you know, DHCP/SLAAC.

Goodbye Greenqloud, hello DigitalOcean. Goodbye nginx, hello 443d. Now you can access this website using HTTP/2 over IPv6!