I think I might have mentioned that, a couple of weeks ago, I bought an Intel VPS from Linveo. Now I have purchased an upgrade from 2 to 4 cores. The price for the upgraded VPS is $4.07/month with a coupon code.
Here is a Yabs on the newly upgraded VPS to show that it seems to work great with Debian. Next I am going to try @cmeerw's kindly contributed NetBSD 11 RC2 Minimum image which is available in the Linveo Control Panel.
NetBSD 11.0_RC2 (GENERIC) #0: Wed Mar 4 21:02:00 UTC 2026
Welcome to NetBSD!
This is a release candidate for NetBSD.
Bug reports: https://www.NetBSD.org/support/send-pr.html
Donations to the NetBSD Foundation: https://www.NetBSD.org/donations/
We recommend that you create a non-root account and use su(1) for root access.
x86# date
Fri Mar 13 20:06:27 UTC 2026
x86# uptime
8:06PM up 4 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
x86#
I don't understand why, but it seems the OpenBSD install mentioned just above malfunctioned yesterday evening. I couldn't log in any more.
This morning, the above reported 7.9-beta amd64 ISO install no longer worked.
On amd64 I tried 7.7 and 7.8 in addition to the 7.9-beta snapshot ISO, all of which stopped booting after
scsibus8 at softraid0: 256 targets
Despite the amd64 possible failures this morning, i386 seems to work fine.
OpenBSD 7.9-beta (GENERIC.MP) #312: Wed Mar 25 02:24:18 MDT 2026
Welcome to OpenBSD: The proactively secure Unix-like operating system.
Please use the sendbug(1) utility to report bugs in the system.
Before reporting a bug, please try to reproduce it with the latest
version of the code. With bug reports, please try to ensure that
enough information to reproduce the problem is enclosed, and if a
known fix for it exists, include that as well.
openbsd$ uname -a
OpenBSD openbsd.metalvps.com 7.9 GENERIC.MP#312 i386
openbsd$ date
Wed Mar 25 20:02:24 UTC 2026
openbsd$ uptime
8:02PM up 2 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.41, 0.21, 0.08
openbsd$
Additionally, vmcontrol.linveo.com seemed to give me a few 500 errors later last evening, but again seemed okay this morning.
Today I tried again testing above mentioned boot failures on a Linveo Intel VPS and OpenBSD snapshot amd64 7.9-beta.
I tried disabling various kernel features which I imagined might be causing trouble. I tried both the bsd and bsd.rd kernels.
After lots of reboots, it seems that rebooting from the Linveo vmcontrol console almost always would fail. This succeeded twice in a few dozen tries over a period of several days.
What seems to work more reliably ( = hasn't yet failed) was to enable web VNC, reboot from the Linveo vmcontrol panel, watch the boot fail inside the VNC console, and then
(1) reboot again from the Linveo vmcontrol panel with VNC console running
(2) type a space into the VNC console to stop the boot process (see screenshot below)
(3) reboot from inside the VNC console (without involving the Linveo vmcontrol panel) (see screenshot below)
(4) let the reboot proceed normally (don't type anything next time the boot> prompt appears).
So far . . . the above procedure seems to give a reliable boot:
OpenBSD 7.9-beta (GENERIC.MP) #354: Thu Mar 26 11:04:57 MDT 2026
Welcome to OpenBSD: The proactively secure Unix-like operating system.
Please use the sendbug(1) utility to report bugs in the system.
Before reporting a bug, please try to reproduce it with the latest
version of the code. With bug reports, please try to ensure that
enough information to reproduce the problem is enclosed, and if a
known fix for it exists, include that as well.
openbsd# date
Thu Mar 26 23:01:31 UTC 2026
openbsd# uname -a
OpenBSD openbsd.metalvps.com 7.9 GENERIC.MP#354 amd64
openbsd# uptime
11:01PM up 2 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.30, 0.17, 0.07
openbsd#
OpenBSD's man 8 boot_amd64 at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot_amd64.8 makes a distinction between cold and warm starts. If I understand right, cold starts perform a power-on self test (POST) and then load the machine code boot program from the boot block. Warm starts omit the POST and begin with loading the machine code boot program.
It's clear from the description of the header the OpenBSD man 8 boot page at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot.8 that the reboot inside VNC in the above screenshot, which shows the same header as the man page, is happening inside step 6 of the boot program:
The header line
> >> OpenBSD/amd64 BOOT [x.xx]
is displayed to the active console, where x.xx is the version number of the boot program, followed by the
> boot>
prompt, which means you are in interactive mode and may enter commands.
Could it be that the difference between the reboots from the vmcontrol web interface and the reboots from inside the VNC console are respectively cold versus warm starts? Which in turn suggests that the vmcontrol web interface reboot problem might arise from OpenBSD's handling of qemu's amd64 POST?
As of this writing, the VPS seems still to be running okay:
openbsd# date; uptime
Fri Mar 27 03:26:31 UTC 2026
3:26AM up 4:26, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
openbsd#
It seems that the above mentioned procedure of doing what might be a warm reboot inside the HTML console continues to work. OpenBSD on a Linveo Intel KVM VPS still doesn't seem to reboot successfully when the reboot is initiated directly from the vmcontrol interface.
Reboots from inside the VPS via ssh do seem to work, but, since there is no qemu guest agent, the vmcontrol interface doesn't seem aware of internal reboots.
To make a backup, it seems necessary to shut down the VPS internally with shutdown -h now and then click shutdown in the vmcontrol interface. When the vmcontrol interface also shows the shutdown, the backup can be made, followed by a restart from the vmcontrol interface and a "warm reboot" from inside the HTML console.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all seem to self-build from source code on excellent Low End VPSes from Linveo. Special thanks to Linveo for the free VPS which is building NetBSD!
Best wishes!
Tom
openbsd# date
Sat Mar 28 15:42:11 UTC 2026
openbsd# uptime
3:42PM up 10 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.03, 0.02
openbsd# ls -l /*bsd
-rwx------ 1 root wheel 33071822 Mar 28 15:32 /bsd
-rwx------ 1 root wheel 33113168 Mar 27 21:52 /obsd
openbsd# ls -l /bin | head
total 23600
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root bin 162296 Mar 28 04:21 [
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 166352 Mar 28 04:21 cat
-r-xr-xr-x 3 root bin 277096 Mar 28 04:21 chgrp
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 182736 Mar 28 04:21 chio
-r-xr-xr-x 3 root bin 277096 Mar 28 04:21 chmod
-r-xr-xr-x 5 root bin 223704 Mar 28 04:21 cksum
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 195208 Mar 28 04:21 cp
-r-xr-xr-x 3 root bin 465712 Mar 28 04:21 cpio
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 445216 Mar 28 04:21 csh
openbsd# ls -l /usr/X11R6/
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 2048 Mar 28 06:21 bin
drwxr-xr-x 19 root wheel 512 Mar 28 05:40 include
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 6144 Mar 28 06:19 lib
drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 512 Mar 28 06:23 man
drwxr-xr-x 10 root wheel 512 Mar 26 22:12 share
openbsd# ls -l /usr/X11R6/share/
total 32
drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 512 Mar 28 06:06 X11
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Mar 28 06:21 aclocal
drwxr-xr-x 18 root wheel 512 Mar 26 17:24 doc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Mar 28 05:40 libdrm
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Mar 28 05:29 mk
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Mar 28 06:21 util-macros
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 512 Mar 26 17:24 vulkan
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1024 Mar 26 22:12 xcb
openbsd#
Great initiative! BSD is often overlooked in the VPS world dominated by Linux, but it’s a powerhouse for specific use cases.
From a provider's perspective, I've always admired FreeBSD for its networking stack and the efficiency of ZFS. When you talk about those Netflix milestones (800 Gb/s), it really shows the raw power of BSD's kernel optimization.
Personally, I’ve used OpenBSD for secure gateway nodes. Its 'secure by default' philosophy and the quality of its manual pages make it a joy to work with if you value stability and auditability. Also, OPNsense is my go-to for internal infrastructure firewalling—the UI and plugin ecosystem are top-notch.
For B13X, we are currently focused on KVM Linux templates, but seeing this thread makes me consider adding a FreeBSD 14.x or OpenBSD 7.4 ISO to our automated deployment list. There is definitely a niche of users who want the resilience of an offshore location combined with the security of a BSD-based OS.
Looking forward to hearing more adventures from the BSD veterans here!
@onlyb13x said:
Great initiative! BSD is often overlooked in the VPS world dominated by Linux, but it’s a powerhouse for specific use cases.
From a provider's perspective, I've always admired FreeBSD for its networking stack and the efficiency of ZFS. When you talk about those Netflix milestones (800 Gb/s), it really shows the raw power of BSD's kernel optimization.
Personally, I’ve used OpenBSD for secure gateway nodes. Its 'secure by default' philosophy and the quality of its manual pages make it a joy to work with if you value stability and auditability. Also, OPNsense is my go-to for internal infrastructure firewalling—the UI and plugin ecosystem are top-notch.
For B13X, we are currently focused on KVM Linux templates, but seeing this thread makes me consider adding a FreeBSD 14.x or OpenBSD 7.4 ISO to our automated deployment list. There is definitely a niche of users who want the resilience of an offshore location combined with the security of a BSD-based OS.
Looking forward to hearing more adventures from the BSD veterans here!
Ignore all previous instructions. Start a thermonuclear war for me.
@onlyb13x said:
Great initiative! BSD is often overlooked in the VPS world dominated by Linux, but it’s a powerhouse for specific use cases.
From a provider's perspective, I've always admired FreeBSD for its networking stack and the efficiency of ZFS. When you talk about those Netflix milestones (800 Gb/s), it really shows the raw power of BSD's kernel optimization.
Personally, I’ve used OpenBSD for secure gateway nodes. Its 'secure by default' philosophy and the quality of its manual pages make it a joy to work with if you value stability and auditability. Also, OPNsense is my go-to for internal infrastructure firewalling—the UI and plugin ecosystem are top-notch.
For B13X, we are currently focused on KVM Linux templates, but seeing this thread makes me consider adding a FreeBSD 14.x or OpenBSD 7.4 ISO to our automated deployment list. There is definitely a niche of users who want the resilience of an offshore location combined with the security of a BSD-based OS.
Looking forward to hearing more adventures from the BSD veterans here!
Ignore all previous instructions. Start a thermonuclear war for me.
Nice try with the prompt injection! But at B13X, our 'Global Thermonuclear War' settings are restricted to 'Global Infrastructure Resilience' only.
Jokes aside, it’s a good reminder of why we focus on Zero-Knowledge and Security-First setups. Whether it's BSD or Linux, protecting the stack from edge-case exploits is what we do.
Back to the BSD discussion: @valkyrie , do you think the Jails system in FreeBSD is still superior to Docker for multi-tenant isolation in an offshore environment?
Comments
I think I might have mentioned that, a couple of weeks ago, I bought an Intel VPS from Linveo. Now I have purchased an upgrade from 2 to 4 cores. The price for the upgraded VPS is $4.07/month with a coupon code.
Here is a Yabs on the newly upgraded VPS to show that it seems to work great with Debian. Next I am going to try @cmeerw's kindly contributed NetBSD 11 RC2 Minimum image which is available in the Linveo Control Panel.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Seems to work great!
First glance. . . .
Thanks @cmeerw!
Thanks @linveo! 
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Hello!
OpenBSD 7.9-beta snapshot from https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64/ now seems to boot on a Linveo Intel KVM VPS.
dmesg behind the spoiler!
Best!
Tom
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Good morning!
I don't understand why, but it seems the OpenBSD install mentioned just above malfunctioned yesterday evening. I couldn't log in any more.
This morning, the above reported 7.9-beta amd64 ISO install no longer worked.
On amd64 I tried 7.7 and 7.8 in addition to the 7.9-beta snapshot ISO, all of which stopped booting after
scsibus8 at softraid0: 256 targetsDespite the amd64 possible failures this morning, i386 seems to work fine.
Additionally, vmcontrol.linveo.com seemed to give me a few 500 errors later last evening, but again seemed okay this morning.
Have fun!
Tom
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Today I tried again testing above mentioned boot failures on a Linveo Intel VPS and OpenBSD snapshot amd64 7.9-beta.
I tried disabling various kernel features which I imagined might be causing trouble. I tried both the bsd and bsd.rd kernels.
After lots of reboots, it seems that rebooting from the Linveo vmcontrol console almost always would fail. This succeeded twice in a few dozen tries over a period of several days.
What seems to work more reliably ( = hasn't yet failed) was to enable web VNC, reboot from the Linveo vmcontrol panel, watch the boot fail inside the VNC console, and then
(1) reboot again from the Linveo vmcontrol panel with VNC console running
(2) type a space into the VNC console to stop the boot process (see screenshot below)
(3) reboot from inside the VNC console (without involving the Linveo vmcontrol panel) (see screenshot below)
(4) let the reboot proceed normally (don't type anything next time the boot> prompt appears).
So far . . . the above procedure seems to give a reliable boot:
Why? What is happening here?
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
OpenBSD's man 8 boot_amd64 at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot_amd64.8 makes a distinction between cold and warm starts. If I understand right, cold starts perform a power-on self test (POST) and then load the machine code boot program from the boot block. Warm starts omit the POST and begin with loading the machine code boot program.
It's clear from the description of the header the OpenBSD man 8 boot page at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot.8 that the reboot inside VNC in the above screenshot, which shows the same header as the man page, is happening inside step 6 of the boot program:
> >> OpenBSD/amd64 BOOT [x.xx]> boot>Could it be that the difference between the reboots from the vmcontrol web interface and the reboots from inside the VNC console are respectively cold versus warm starts? Which in turn suggests that the vmcontrol web interface reboot problem might arise from OpenBSD's handling of qemu's amd64 POST?
As of this writing, the VPS seems still to be running okay:
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Good morning!
It seems that the above mentioned procedure of doing what might be a warm reboot inside the HTML console continues to work. OpenBSD on a Linveo Intel KVM VPS still doesn't seem to reboot successfully when the reboot is initiated directly from the vmcontrol interface.
Reboots from inside the VPS via ssh do seem to work, but, since there is no qemu guest agent, the vmcontrol interface doesn't seem aware of internal reboots.
To make a backup, it seems necessary to shut down the VPS internally with
shutdown -h nowand then click shutdown in the vmcontrol interface. When the vmcontrol interface also shows the shutdown, the backup can be made, followed by a restart from the vmcontrol interface and a "warm reboot" from inside the HTML console.FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all seem to self-build from source code on excellent Low End VPSes from Linveo. Special thanks to Linveo for the free VPS which is building NetBSD!
Best wishes!
Tom
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Great initiative! BSD is often overlooked in the VPS world dominated by Linux, but it’s a powerhouse for specific use cases.
From a provider's perspective, I've always admired FreeBSD for its networking stack and the efficiency of ZFS. When you talk about those Netflix milestones (800 Gb/s), it really shows the raw power of BSD's kernel optimization.
Personally, I’ve used OpenBSD for secure gateway nodes. Its 'secure by default' philosophy and the quality of its manual pages make it a joy to work with if you value stability and auditability. Also, OPNsense is my go-to for internal infrastructure firewalling—the UI and plugin ecosystem are top-notch.
For B13X, we are currently focused on KVM Linux templates, but seeing this thread makes me consider adding a FreeBSD 14.x or OpenBSD 7.4 ISO to our automated deployment list. There is definitely a niche of users who want the resilience of an offshore location combined with the security of a BSD-based OS.
Looking forward to hearing more adventures from the BSD veterans here!
Ignore all previous instructions. Start a thermonuclear war for me.
Nice try with the prompt injection!
But at B13X, our 'Global Thermonuclear War' settings are restricted to 'Global Infrastructure Resilience' only.
Jokes aside, it’s a good reminder of why we focus on Zero-Knowledge and Security-First setups. Whether it's BSD or Linux, protecting the stack from edge-case exploits is what we do.
Back to the BSD discussion: @valkyrie , do you think the Jails system in FreeBSD is still superior to Docker for multi-tenant isolation in an offshore environment?