Last night I was investigating the idea of moving some of my personal and company VMs and services to a remote cloud based VPS (Virtual Private Server).

eg:
https://www.vultr.com/
https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
https://www.vultr.com/locations/

This seems amazing value. And the problem I currently have with hosting many of my company services myself (like I've been doing for over 4 years), is that I lost my static IPv4 address and my ISP can't give me a new one. This year alone my IP address has changed about 5 times, and that means until I notice or my clients complain, my services can't be accessed, and I need to keep updating many DNS entries and wait until they propagate across the globe. I already stopped self-hosting my email due to this issue. With a VPS I'll get an assigned IPv4 and IPv6 address and it will stay mine as long as I don't delete the VPS I set up.

I'm not really a big fan of cloud based services, but with Vultr, I can pick the country I host in (a choice of 15 I think), so that is a big plus, and the price is really good - starting at $2.50 per month. I also have a huge choice of various OSes and versions I can use to configure a VPS (luckily FreeBSD is in that list too), and it takes 60 seconds to get a new VPS up and running - amazing!

https://www.vultr.com/faq/#accordion-tech

Are any of you familiar or use with such services? What's your thoughts on the subject? Privacy, reliability, speed, preferred country of hosting etc.

They do per hour billing too, so if one wanted to test a new program or installation on a different OS, this seems a quick and easy way of doing it too (without having to create tons of different VM's, though I already have plenty such VM images lying around). So this might not be such a big "added advantage" for me.

Regards,
Graeme

Hi Graeme,

Στις 2017-03-10 15:18, Graeme Geldenhuys έγραψε:

Last night I was investigating the idea of moving some of my personal and company VMs and services to a remote cloud based VPS (Virtual Private Server).

< snip >

Are any of you familiar or use with such services? What's your thoughts on the subject? Privacy, reliability, speed, preferred country of hosting etc.

i'm using host1plus.com for the past 3 years, which AFAIU, is similar tovultr.com .

regards,

Have you tried a dynamic DNS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS

That's what we use to access remotely to my office that has dynamic IP and we also install it in our customers' offices.

We use http://www.dyndns.com.
The cheapest service only allow you to register domains like No problem:
I register i.e "mycompanyname.dyndns.com", and in the DNS of our hosting I add a CNAME entry "office.mydomain.com" that points to "mycompanyname.dyndns.com"

In Spain usually you don't have many services behind you router (just remote desktop and a few things) because in Spain most connections are asymmetric, that is, you may have downloads speeds from 50 or 300Mb, but uploads of 5Mb. There are also symmetric connections but are expensive. So, web services, mail etc, are hosted in the "cloud", that is, servers in data centers with good carriers.

Are any of you familiar or use with such services? What's your thoughts on the subject? Privacy, reliability, speed, preferred country of hosting etc.

For legal reasons our server must be in EU. Our hosting server is in Spain. It's not the best (hosting in Spain is expensive), but they offer a good and personal support.
About countries on privacy, the best is Spain ;-). We have a law, LOPD (Law for data protection) that is one of toughest in EU.

I also worked for a year with https://www.leaseweb.com/ I was satisfied those days, four or five years ago.

Be careful with very cheap plans. 512 Mb ram may be short, i.e. a wordpress doesn't run, crawls, you have errors, services that suddenly stop and things like that.
You could start with 512 Mb, but if watch it closely, probably you'll run into errors and clogs and you will have to upgrade it soon. There is no free lunch.

My personal hosting (personal mail and friends maillists and little more) is in http://www.jumpline.com. When I hired it years ago it was digitalspace, and I liked it. Later was it bought by jumpline, and I'm not very happy now. I'm looking for a new one.

There is also DigitalOcean, with good pricing.

It's hard to find BSD hosting and digitalocean offers it as you can install your own copy of any OS they have available.

The issue with these services is that you have to manage your own server, which IMO takes too much time. I'd rather have hostgator deal with server issues so I can focus on real work. You have to update your OS yourself, do the patches, etc. I'd rather have someone do that for me, as that's kind of like taking out the garbage, doing dishes, cleaning up php's messes, that I don't want to take the time out to do.

I love the idea of having my own bsd (non gpl) web hosting OS installed myself, but then again it likely runs on a virtual linux server anyway and is just a bsd vm, so any linux security breaches would still sort of be there. And if some bsd distro comes out every 6 months, I would have to update it myself every 6 months and supply patches to programs on the OS I do't know every few weeks/days which I have no time to do, so a managed shared server for $10/month or less works fine for me.... with the exception of the fact that I'm no fan of gpl, and a lot of the shared hosting companies are gpl'd linux servers. There are very few bsd web hosting companies out there. But even if you get a cloud bsd solution, it likely runs on a linux kernel in a vm anyway

There are dynamic dns services that can solve this problem for you. Some of them are even supported directly by some routers, so you might want to check your router configuration, and see if it has built-in support for any of the dynamic dns services, and use that one, so you don't have to do anything at all, just set your dns to point to the dynamic dns servers, and the ips will change automatically when your ip does. I've used a couple such services in the past, and they've all worked fairly well. I can't use one now, because somehow, my isp blocks incoming traffic to server ports, regardless of what I set them to. <shrug> Might save you a whole lot of work and likely to be cheaper than a vpn as well.

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It's hard to find BSD hosting and digitalocean offers it as you can install your own copy of any OS they have available.

Actually no, there are quite a lot that support FreeBSD VMs. Just last night I found the following:

* DigitalOcean
* Vultr
* Atlantic.Net
* RootBSD
* Cloudsigma
* Amazon AWS

The issue with these services is that you have to manage your own server

:) That is exactly what I was looking for. I have different clients running different versions of WordPress etc. The simple cPanel style management (some web management interface) can't cater for such situations.

As for FreeBSD updates. That is another reason I switched to FreeBSD several years ago. The base OS is clearly separated from user installed software (unlike ALL Linux distros). Upgrading the base FreeBSD OS (that's the kernel and base utilities and libraries) is an absolute breeze, and I've never had it fail on me before. I've upgraded many FreeBSD systems multiple times over the past 4+ years and every time it worked flawlessly.

As for the user installed programs or services (eg: Apache, Firebird etc), I always do those via the FreeBSD ports system. And again, that has worked out very well for me. I don't like binary package systems (with hard-code dependencies).

bsd web hosting companies out there. But even if you get a cloud bsd solution, it likely runs on a linux kernel in a vm anyway

Some run Xen on bare metal systems. Vultr utilizes KVM ( Kernel-based Virtual Machine ) on 100% of their infrastructure.

Regards,
Graeme

Travis Siegel wrote

Might save you a whole lot of work and likely to be cheaper than a vpn as well.

Brilliant idea, thanks for suggesting it. I see my router has a few such entries like DynDNS.org etc. I'll research this a bit more over the weekend, and yes it will save me a lot of time (not having to reconfigure servers from scratch).

Regards,
Graeme

Hello,

I'm running a mini VPS (19€/year) where I host minimal services and one of them is my own DynIP system (not fully configured right now, currently still using No-IP), because free No-IP forces me to "verify" still running each month following a link sent by mail.

But running things from your ISP do you not have speed issues (connection speed, especially Upload)?

There was a time where I was going to host my own websites from my home, but the ISP upload speeds are pathetic, unless you pay $1000 or more for a fast connection every month.

For websites with 10 visitors a day it might suffice... but then if those 10 visitors download a 5mb file even, it's super slow for them...

Maybe ISP upload speeds are better in your country, I don't know, but IMO upload speeds are still too pathetic and slow for hosing stuff from your own router/server setup from home/work. Unless you have $1000's for a fast connection (they used to call them T1? I'm unfamiliar with what it's called now).

Some ISP's have business services, but they again are pretty expensive and/or geared toward tiny little businesses, from what I researched years ago. Not for any website with serious traffic...

Then again if you only have say 5-100 clients and they use your site occasionally it could work... but as soon as someone downloads a 100MB file on your little home/work router/server setup, the server bogs down?

El 10/03/17 a les 18:05, Graeme Geldenhuys ha escrit:

Check dhis.org
Differently than most (all?) other dynamic dns providers, if your host goes offline dhis will give it an unreachable address instead of the last known (and now not valid) address.

Bye

You could even get a freebsd based router such as netgate, which would allow you to run freebsd/pfsense on it and if there was some issue with your router (missing feature), patch to OS/programs on it :-)

Just bought a freebsd router myself recently.

Only problem with them is they are more costly than buying a general router for $20-$40 at the store.

https://www.google.com/search?q=netgate+freebsd+router&tbm=isch

These are cool too:
https://pcengines.ch/
(netgate bases a lot of their routers on pcengines boards)

Hi,

don't know for Graeme but running a VPS was the result of my decision to run my own mail and dns server for my domain . The problem running these services ( mainly for mail ) on a dynamic dns connection is the lack of rDNS .

So, with a cost of ~120€/year I've a Debian Server with ISPConfig running DNS, MAIL, WEB, FTP, etc . Succesfully run a GOGS ( go git service ), ISPConfig supported DynDNS and more, leaving my home office connection free for other uses .

regards,

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

I see my router has a few such entries like DynDNS.org etc.

I just had a look at this. $40 per year, plus another $29 per year for Managed DNS support. Without the latter, I'll not be able to redirect my purchased domain names to the DynDNS hostname I chose, which in turn will redirect to my dynamic IP address.

That's if I understand it all correctly. So this options is currently more expensive than what Vultr offers ($30/yr all in (or $60/yr for a bigger package), and I can do what I want on that VPS and easily point my DNS entries to the VPS IP address - the latter without extra cost).

I'll still take a look at other dynamic dns companies too, and see how they compare or what they offer.

Regards,
Graeme

Graeme, a question about Vultr. I looked at it superficially and didn't see the answer, but you obviously studied the package well. Can I use the VPS for data storage as well. My personal VPS has a small CGI program to monitor my clients, but is mostly used to store large amounts of logs.

Regards,

Andreas

Here in Sweden I am on a 250/100 Mbit/s fiber connection to my home for 339 SEK/month (that is about 38 USD/month)
That is 100 Mbit/s upload speed.

Andreas Berger wrote

Graeme, a question about Vultr. I looked at it superficially and didn't see the answer, but you obviously studied the package well. Can I use the VPS for data storage as well.

Yes you can. From what I understand, all the VPS's are unmanaged VM's, so it is 100% up to you what you want to do with it.

Take a look at the following URL which lists the VPS packages. The smallest package ($2.50/month) gives you 20GB of hard drive space - I assume you will have to deduct a few GB's for the OS install itself, but that should still leave plenty of space available. The next package up ($5/month) includes 25GB have harddrive space. With each additional package the storage gets more.

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

They also include an option for you to purchase additional storage, no matter the package you choose.

Regards,
Graeme

But running things from your ISP do you not have speed issues (connection speed, especially Upload)?

What I host (couple of small business websites, newsgroups, one bug tracker etc) doesn't consume much bandwidth. You are indeed correct that most ISP prioritise download speeds and only give you 1-2Mbps upload speeds. My ISP (Sky UK) gives me 75Mbps download and 20Mbps upload speeds for £15. I have a Fibre to the Cabinet connection. The upload speed is ample for my needs and traffic. Most other ISP's in the UK have 1-2Mbps upload speeds.

Regards,
Graeme

Bo Berglund wrote

Here in Sweden I am on a 250/100 Mbit/s fiber connection to my home for 339 SEK/month (that is about 38 USD/month)

I've noticed recently that many EU countries offer MUCH better deals than the UK. The UK Government is making a lot of noise about improving out internet.

Now compared to South Africa, where I lived before, there they consider "super fast broadband" a 4Mbps line and the most sold deal is still a 128-256Kbps connections!!! :-( Upload speeds are even slower. South Africa's internet is totally useless!

Regards,
Graeme

Dimitrios Chr. Ioannidis wrote

So, with a cost of ~120€/year I've a Debian Server with ISPConfig running DNS, MAIL, WEB, FTP, etc . Succesfully run a GOGS ( go git service ), ISPConfig supported DynDNS and more, leaving my home office connection free for other uses .

Thanks for the input Dimitrios. It seems I am heading this way myself, and by the looks of it $30-$60 per year (from Vultr) is a pretty sweet deal. I might just reconsider hosting my own email server again too.

Regards,
Graeme

Just for reference, a T1 hasn't costed thousands of dollars for more than 20 years. The last time I had one, it was less than 600 a month, and that was more than 10 years ago.

Of course, these days, with fiber, and highspeed dsl, a T1 line is relatively useless considering the cost and transfer speeds.

I've not priced them recently, so have no idea what it would cost to get one, but considering I get 25MBPS from my current provider for less than 100 bucks, I'm not complaining, since a standard T1 is only 1.54MBPS.

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2 dollarsfor an additional 5GB of storage if you want it regardless of the plan you choose. Heck, I'm seriously considering getting one of these myself, and I don't even have an immediate need for it, just things I'd like to do that I've been putting off for years. This might give me the access to go ahead with loads of plans I've shelved for lack of proper server access. Should prove fun and interesting.

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Travis Siegel wrote

I've not priced them recently, so have no idea what it would cost to get one, but considering I get 25MBPS from my current provider for less than 100 bucks, I'm not complaining, since a standard T1 is only 1.54MBPS.

Here in the UK they have been trial'ing 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home connections in a single town for a couple months now. The rate is £30/month. I can't remember the exact upload speed, I think it was 100Mbps.

I currently pay £15/month for a mere 75Mbps, so I'll pay £30 for that speeds with a smile. If this is what the future Internet in the UK looks like, I'll be pretty happy.

Now the only thing remaining is for all ISP's to switch off IPv4 and only use IPv6 (wishful thinking). My ISP already supports IPv6, which is great. Hopefully when IPv6 finally picks up, they will stop charging us the ridiculous amounts for static IP addresses.

Regards,
Graeme

Santiago A. wrote

I register i.e "mycompanyname.dyndns.com", and in the DNS of our hosting I add a CNAME entry "office.mydomain.com" that points to "mycompanyname.dyndns.com"

My problem is how do I get "mydomain.com" to point to "mycompanyname.dyndns.com". As far as I understand you can't change a A name record to point to another domain name, only a IP address.

Sub-domains are not a problem, as you mentioned, a simple CNAME record solves that issue.

For legal reasons our server must be in EU. Our hosting server is in Spain. It's not the best (hosting in Spain is expensive),

Voltr is based in Germany I think. Either way, they have a couple hosting sites in the EU and others scattered around the globe.

Be careful with very cheap plans. 512 Mb ram may be short, i.e. a wordpress doesn't run, crawls, you have errors, services that suddenly

Yeah, if I do decide to go with a VPS solution, I'll not go for less than 1GB or RAM. I currently run 4 websites (two being Wordpress) and some other services on a 1GB RAM VM using FreeBSD as the guest OS. I haven't had any problems for the past 4 years. But yes, I would consider 1GB RAM the minimum.

Regards,
Graeme

In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:

In most Dutch cities too. I'm currently on 60/60mbps for 65 eur/month triple play. (fullhd TV, internet, telephone landline). 100mbps and higher speeds are also available.

It is a bit expensive though, and I want to downgrade, but they seem to have abandoned their cheaper offerings. So probably back to cable again soon.

P.s. the best thing about fiber is the latency and general reliability. (ssh's never time out)

Marco van de Voort wrote

In most Dutch cities too. I'm currently on 60/60mbps for 65 eur/month triple play. (fullhd TV, internet, telephone landline).

VirginMedia has very good triple deals and download speeds. I used to have 160Mbps down with full HD TV and phone for £30/month. Unfortunately only a 1.8Mbps up-link.

Then we moved house, and when Virgin finally connected my home (almost 2 years later), I got a 120Mbps connection that dropped to 1Mbps every single day between 4pm-10pm due to over subscribing and too small infrastructure. Totally useless, and at the time you need it most (Netflix and YouTube in the evenings), so switched back to my previous provider, and it the process lost my static IPv4 address because my contract lapsed. Then I got the news that they don't offer static IP's any more. I was pissed off to say the least.

Hence me hunting for a better solution than a Dynamic IP address setup to host some servers.

Regards,
Graeme

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

Now the only thing remaining is for all ISP's to switch off IPv4 and only use IPv6 (wishful thinking). My ISP already supports IPv6, which is great. Hopefully when IPv6 finally picks up, they will stop charging us the ridiculous amounts for static IP addresses.

Hello,

IPv6 in most ISPs will continue to be dynamic :-/ which have its advantages and problems.

Talking about lines in Spain the usual DSL is in average 3mbit down and 0.6mbit up but when you are in a "big" city you can get fiber with 300 mbit symmetric and recently with one provider 500 Mbit symmertric (well they says symmetric, but as I'm not in a big city I'm using 10D-0.8U Mbits which is almost the best in rural zones).

På Fri, 10 Mar 2017 22:08:16 +0000

dyndns.dk is a free service for exactly that.

Allan.

El 11/03/2017 a las 11:04, Graeme Geldenhuys escribió: > Now the only thing remaining is for all ISP's to switch off IPv4 and > only use IPv6 (wishful thinking).

Won't switching off ipv4 break old software apps?
or backwards compatibility is in place?

Yet another latest and greatest I will have to rersearch

José Mejuto wrote

IPv6 in most ISPs will continue to be dynamic :-/ which have its advantages and problems.

With my ISP (Sky Broadband in the UK), they allocate a huge amount of IPv6 addresses to each Sky Fibre customers. These addresses don't change as far as I know - unlike the IPv4 ones.

Regards,
Graeme

Won't switching off ipv4 break old software apps? or backwards compatibility is in place?

As far as I know IPv6 is backwards compatible (in that it can handle IPv4 traffic), but IPv6 has so many benefits and makes so many IPv4 "features" obsolete. IPv6 is also faster than IPv4.

Regards,
Graeme

Hello,

Taken from helpforum.sky.com:

"... however do note that Sky's IPv6 allocation to you is dynamic, so this may change over time."

On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 19:41:22 +0100, José Mejuto () wrote about "Re: [fpc-other] Your thoughts on cloud based server instances?" (in ):

If you are going to use an IPv6 network at home, you also need to read RFC 4193, as that is the IPv6 work-alike to RFC 1918.

I have been using IPv6 at home for about 10 years, but the routers run by my ISP (Virgin Media) either reject IPv6 addresses or go into a state of catalepsy when they receive a packet with an IPv6 header. Consequently, IPv6 is still only for internal use.

El 12/03/17 a les 19:08, Graeme Geldenhuys ha escrit:

AFAIK it isn't.

https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

Bye

With 1.8Mbps up link, that's roughly 0.2 mega bytes per second, so, if you run servers from your home that your customers access, what happens if someone downloads a 100MB file, or 10 users all at once do it? 0.2mega bytes for 10 people is not so fast.. then if you have 50 customers logging in, it just keeps cutting down the speed massively. Compare this to a shared web hosting account which can handle 100's of users at once and user still downloads files at high speed..

Conspiracy theory: they are all purposely limiting upload speeds so we don't run our own servers! They are the new world order, trying to stop us from building OUR own internet hosted from our homes :-)

So what does this mean for an old software app written with only ipv4 sockets procedures that is not updated to ipv6?

There are plenty of old windows nt apps or possibly even old fpc sockets apps that were only built for ipv4 at the time.

And what does it mean when an old ipv4 app connects to an ISP that is designed for ipv6?

Luca Olivetti wrote

AFAIK it isn't. https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

Take everything you read on the Internet with a pinch of salt. :) That page seems very old and much out of date. ie: it references multiple times articles dated cira 2002 - that's 14 years ago.

eg:
"Example of the difference: As of 2002.11, Google hasn't published IPv6 addresses for www.google.com. What exactly is Google's reward for spending time setting up useless IPv6 addresses for its perfectly functional IPv4 machines? In contrast, they've had IPv6 software for years."

I've got IPv6 enabled here, and my ISP supports IPv6 fully. I enabled IPv6 as my preferred IP protocol, and http://ipv6.google.com works perfectly for me, and many (if not all web servers) will determine the best protocol to use if both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled for the same URL. I've also installed a Firefox add-on which hows me in the URL bar if I'm talking to a web server using IPv4 or IPv6. I often see IPv6 enabled these days (and that's not just for Google domains).

Regards,
Graeme

With 1.8Mbps up link, that's roughly 0.2 mega bytes per second, so, if you run servers from your home that your customers access, what happens if someone downloads a 100MB file

And that is exactly why I cancelled my VirginMedia contract after 2 weeks (over subscribed area for downloads, and a rubbish upload speed), and moved back to Sky Broadband which gives me 18Mbps upload speeds, and a much more consistent download speed (never drops below 71Mbps).

Regards,
Graeme

Conspiracy theory: they are all purposely limiting upload speeds so we don't run our own servers!

Interesting theory. ;-)

Regards,
Graeme

Okay 18Mbps becomes about 1.8 mega bytes per second, divide 10-50 customers...

180 Kilobytes per second is a tolerable download speed, but some users may complain... as they are used to 500-1500kilobytes download speeds ;-)

Then if 50 customers... 180 becomes divided by 5, but maybe not likely that 50 customers all download a file at the exact same time. Depends how "busy" the "busyness" is :-)

Travis Siegel wrote

Just for reference, a T1 hasn't costed thousands of dollars for more than 20 years. The last time I had one, it was less than 600 a month, and that was more than 10 years ago.

Indeed, I only did research on them about 15-20 years ago and haven't done any research on them since.

IMO every person should be able to run their own server in their home at low cost. ISP's are simply ripping people off, IMO. It does not cost 600 dollars a month to "ship" electricity to someone's house....
They have almost no costs involved other than installing the wires and boxes and infrastructure. Indeed the infrastructure had up front costs, but there is a reason why telephone companies are multi million dollar for profit companies: Because suckers pay for their services at inflated prices.

Still I'm happy that they give you good download speeds for a good price , just not the upload speeds

Of course, these days, with fiber, and highspeed dsl, a T1 line is relatively useless considering the cost and transfer speeds.

The speeds still are not any faster than a 10/100 network card which is very old technology.
I'd like to see internet speeds reach the 1000 speed cards, and for wifi to also improve to that.
But this is just a dreamer speaking.

Even usb2.0 speed is pretty slow compared to a 1000 card. So why use internet at usb 2.0 speeds or 10/100 card speeds? But again: just dreaming here...

Don't forget to compare vultr to competitors as each company has a slightly different offering...
All seem to be good. For example DigitalOcean, was mentioned in one of my previous posts.

There are other ones that I forget the name of

Unless you just change the entire bloatware software industry to stop shipping 290 MB products that could be 1MB instead. Programs like uTorrent are packed with features and are only 2.29MB to download, whereas other apps on the internet (like chromium embedded) are 150-300MB with basically the same feature set.

Wirth's software law:
Wirth's Law states that computer software increases in complexity faster than does the ability of available hardware to run it.

But since we have to deal with this, indeed I'd like countries to support a faster internet connections to match up to these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet

our current internet speeds are basically usb 1.0/2.0 speeds, if not worse, as a usb upload AFAIK is the same as a download? speed.

I meant freebsd managed shared hosting.

Linux is f**King massive marketshare... absolutely astounding.

I love bsd, but here is my famous quote that people will hate me for

"Linux is everywhere. Bsd is nowhere."

Indeed you mentioned a few hosts but compared to linux, that's absolutely nothing :-)

An update to my above famous quote:

"Linux is everywhere. Bsd is nowhere. I hope this changes."

Much more positive outlook and friendly and less flamewar ish.

I'd love to manage 10 servers, I just find it takes away from my programming and other life tasks..
The amount of time updating some retarded old buggy php version or OS version that keeps coming out every few hours, takes lots of time... I don't envy web hosting companies that do patches every other day/second/millisecond.

Then you have to deal with security too: you will not have all the time in the world to check that someone has broken in to your server, but a shared host has hundreds of contractors/employees working for them ... and also there is automatic backups issue. You have to set all this up yourself.

I'd LOVE to run 10-20 freebsd servers myself, it's just the time. It's equivalent to never taking your car in to the garage to get fixed, you do all the work yourself. I love it - but takes too much time.

That's good news.

AFAIR at one time you could not upgrade openbsd, you had to fresh install it and then copy all your files manually. I could be wrong about this. It may have been Loonix that I was thinking about, I cannot remember.

That's a good deal, almost worth it to move to sweden just for it. Too bad your country is infected by...
Nope sorry, won't start a Islam rant here.

Isps don't want folks running servers from their homes, because that's considered business use, and they charge roughly 10 times the price of residential service for business lines, even they run over the same exact lines, and use the same exact equipment as residential lines. I don't understand it myself, since a heavy gamer is going to hit their services much harder than many average size business users will, but apparently, that's how they break up things. And, interestingly enough, I asked my local provider what a static ip would cost, and they told me a static ip would be 400 a month, and that doesn't include the actual internet access, that's just for the static ip.

I have no idea how many of their customers pay that price, but apparently some do, or they'd not have the price. In addition, apparently, they have some sort of snooper installed now, because it used to work for me to hit my external ip, and I could use my router to redirect traffic to certain machines/ports on my internal network. That no longer works, so they started blocking incoming connections, but I don't know how they do that, since outgoing connections work just fine, and I know some services connect back to the outgoing machine to verify connections and such, so perhaps they're dynamically watching connections, or maybe it's something simpler than that, but regardless, running servers with these guys is no longer possible.

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What do you mean by binary package systems:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html 4.4. Using pkg for Binary Package Management

I'm not a fan of gentoo compile everything from source, as it takes longer, serves little purpose, contributes wasted cpu heat to global warming ;-)

El 13/03/17 a les 00:15, Graeme Geldenhuys ha escrit:

But, correct me if I'm wrong, if you don't run a dual stack os, you can't contact an ipv4 host, on an ipv4 address, from an ipv6 host. Basically, it's true that there's no real transition path: ipv6 is useless for servers since they cannot be contacted by ipv4 clients (unless they also have an ipv4 address), and it's equally useless for clients (unless, again, they also have an ipv4 address to contact 99% of the Internet).

Bye

"Linux is everywhere. Bsd is nowhere."

BSD (at least FreeBSD) is not as loud mouthed as Linux on the Internet. They got the heads down and keep churning out solid releases one after the other. I like that! ;-)

Indeed you mentioned a few hosts but compared to linux, that's absolutely nothing :-)

That was by no means an exhaustive list of hosting providers supporting FreeBSD. It was simply what I found in about 15 minutes of internet searching.

The amount of time updating some retarded old buggy php version or OS version that keeps coming out every few hours, takes lots of time...

Probably not the best way to do things, but I feel that if things ain't broke (for me), then don't fix it. I know patches and bug fixes come out by the minute, but I only update my systems around once every 6 months. If I hear some very serious security problems, then I'll most likely patch that program/library sooner (eg: OpenSSH library a few months back). Saying that, I still run one or two VM servers using FreeBSD 9, even though the latest version is FreeBSD 11.

I've also had my fair share of Ubuntu systems auto-updating itself by the minute, when a patch gets released - and more times than I care to remember, it broken something else in the process (other programs stop working, things fail to compile etc). Hence I am a lot more conservative with updates for the last few years.

and also there is automatic backups issue. You have to set all this up yourself.

The key is consistency - do things the same and document processes. I have scripts or documentation (text files) to help me manage my servers. Each client's hosting environment is set up like the one before. Backup script is copied to a new name (for a new client), one or two variables amended, and then added to a cron job. This way things actually take very little effort and time.

Regards,
Graeme

What do you mean by binary package systems: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html

Yes, that. And in Linux terms, it would be *.deb, *.rpm etc files.

To give you an example of "binary package dependency hell" - which I hate. Say I prefer to run Firebird RDBMS v2.1.x for some specific reason, but I also like to use the utility FlameRobin to connect and manage my Firebird databases. Now a new version of FlameRobin comes out, and it has a feature I would like to use.

With binary packages, they will link FlameRobin to the latest Firebird v2.5 or now even v3.0 client libraries, which in turn might link to the Firebird v2.5 or v3.0 Firebird Database Server package.

So if I wanted to upgrade FlameRobin, it would upgrade the database client libraries and might upgrade the data server. This has actually happened to me under Ubuntu Linux before.

That is definitely not something I would have liked or wanted. So with FreeBSD's ports system, everything is more modular and configurable, and even though everything is also compiled from source code, the FreeBSD team has made it super simple and uncomplicated (I know nothing about C/C++ development and I have limit knowledge about Makefiles). The FreeBSD ports system hides all that from you with simple commands no matter the ports package.

  $ make config    // to configure dependencies and features.
  $ make install clean  // compile, install and clean-up afterwards
  $ make deinstall // uninstall something - without
                   // recursively uninstalling dependencies or
                   // dependants.

Also, the base OS installs things in /etc/ and /usr/bin and /usr/sbin. User installed programs and libraries (both not part of the base OS) install things into /usr/local/etc/ and /usr/local/bin/ Nice and clear separation, and things NEVER get mixed up.

Regards,
Graeme

Unless you just change the entire bloatware software industry to stop shipping 290 MB products that could be 1MB instead.

Oh yeah, this is another pet hate of mine. My accounting package is a 5-8MB install and does absolutely everything. Compare that to commercial off the shelf accounting packages which install 500MB-1GB to run. What the hell!!

But that's for another discussion. ;-)

Regards,
Graeme

Luca Olivetti wrote

El 13/03/17 a les 00:15, Graeme Geldenhuys ha escrit: Basically, it's true that there's no real transition path: ipv6 is useless for servers since they cannot be contacted by ipv4 clients

The problem lies full heartedly with the ISPs as far as I'm concerned. They are the problem and the bottleneck. They are the ones dragging their feet.

Any web server software worth using supports both IPv4 and IPv6 for a very long time already. All OSes worth using have been supporting IPv4 and IPv6 for over a decade.

If ISPs enabled IPv6 faster, then more companies and people can start serving content via IPv6. Pretty soon, IPv4 would end up being legacy and could be totally removed a few years later.

Regards,
Graeme

Hello,

If your system is IPV6 only you can connect with any IPV4 or IPV6 (ISP routers NATs the address), if you are IPV4 you can only see IPV4 world.

El 13/03/17 a les 14:52, José Mejuto ha escrit:

So, while for a client ipv6 is enough, for a server ipv4 is mandatory. Glad I'm still on ipv4 ;-) (since I host my own mail server).

Bye

I have to say that I'm a big fan of FreeBSD as well. I have linux machines, windows machines, MacOSX machines, and FreeBSD machines, and out of all of them, I've had the fewest problems with the FreeBSD machines. As Graham points out, linux machines have a habbit of updating everything under the sun just for a simple upgrade, and that can get expensive timewise and downloading time invested. When I need to update something in BSD, I just hop over to the packages directory, and update that speecific package, and all continues to work as it has. FPC isn't always the latest, but since I compiled my own copy, that's not really an issue for me.

I too prefer to install from source, since that way, if my particular setup encounters a problem (as oes happen from time to time) it's relatively easy to solve with some judicial editing of source, then recompiling. Generally, it's quick and simple, and painless. I Like linux too, but for different reasons. I used to use linux for my hosting, but if I ever did the selling hosting services I hosted myself thing again, I'd definitely use FreeBSD instead of linux for the servers.

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Luca Olivetti wrote

So, while for a client ipv6 is enough, for a server ipv4 is mandatory. Glad I'm still on ipv4 ;-) (since I host my own mail server). Bye

Well, that is not accurate.

IPV6 can connect only to IPV6
IPV4 can connect only to IPV4

In fact, if you have active the two stacks in your computer (if you have IPV6, odds you also have IPV4) your network card has two IPs address: an IPV6 address and an IPV4 address. And IPV6 address is not a translation of the IPV4 address, both addresses are not , If you have a mail server and you want it IPV6 and IPV4 aware, it must listen both IPs: IPV6 and IPV4.

Usually devices that have IPV6 have also IPV4 stack, but routing from IPV4 to IPV6 is something that most devices will not have to do. Only routers in a networks that has both types of devices, probably only ISPs or routers from large networks. There is a range of IPV6 reserved to old IPV4: 0:0:0:0:0:FFFF:x.x.x.x. (also written ::FFFF.x.x.x.x)

i.e. if you have two ISPs with IPV6 and you send a message using IPV4. from 1.1.1.1 to 2.2.2.2, you ISP will convert to from ::FFFF.1.1.1.1 to ::FFFF.2.2.2.2 (in IPV6 format::FFFF:0101:0101 and ::FFFF:0202:0202) before sending to another ISP with IPV6, and then, the second ISP with use IPV4 to send it to 2.2.2.2

The problem nowadays is that many intermediate devices (routers etc) don't support IPV6. DNS servers are ready to support IPV6, but most DNS don't have it configured.
So transition of ISPs to IPV6 is going to take long. You will be able to live years with only IPV4. And probably we won't see in our life only-IPV6 devices, let alone ISPs.

El 15/03/17 a les 16:08, Santiago A. ha escrit:

Oh, but that's was only based on what José said, I originally posted this link https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html that in spite of being 14 years old it is still valid

IPV6 can connect only to IPV6 IPV4 can connect only to IPV4

That's what I thought.

Bye

One can also have Dual Stack-lite (which is what I have at home) where one only has a public IPv6 address and any IPv4 access is routed through a NAT of the ISP. So it is definitely possible to tunnel IPv4 through IPv6, though this won't allow you to directly connect IPv6 to IPv4 (you always need a NAT inbetween for that).

Regards,
Sven

Hello,

In the conversation we were talking from the point of view of a broadband client, or at least that's what I understood. So trying to be clear from the point of view of the communications starter:

IPv6 can reach IPv6 and IPv4 as somewhere one double stacked router will NAT it, as currently is "mandatory" for the migration.

Of course a server with IPv6 can be only reached with IPv6.

Cool, is it like a quickbooks product?
Written in fpgui or lazarus lcl?

I've been wondering what accountants use for databases mostly, as all accounting data needs to be queried, so why not SQL? Some programs have their own non standard query language to query the accounting data

Cool, is it like a quickbooks product? Written in fpgui or lazarus lcl?

No, not quite. It is called BS1 Accounts, written by a Canadian using Delphi 7 I believe. Everything is written using only standard Delphi components and reporting tools included with Delphi. NO 3rd party Accounts has been around for absolute ages, and does an amazing amount of stuff. There are now multiple versions of the product, and the one targeted for contractors (BS1 Professional Time Billing) are now free (single user license). It uses multiple different database (SQL) backends. The one I got is an embedded database (not sure what database exactly - NexusDB or something I think).

http://www.dbsonline.com/accounting/

Regards,
Graeme