I have a 2023 Black Friday Crunchy VPS with 4.5GB RAM and 3 CPU fair share. I am offering resources for anyone interested in building a personal site using either WordPress or Ghost CMS. Priority of limited plans will be given to open source projects, community projects, or nonprofits.

What you can choose between:
* WordPress: A versatile and user-friendly platform perfect for beginners and experienced users alike. WordPress offers a plethora of themes and plugins to customize your site according to your needs, whether you're starting a blog, building a portfolio, or creating an online presence for your business.
* Ghost CMS: An efficient and modern platform focused on professional publishing. Ghost stands out with its integration with Mailgun for seamless newsletter distribution and robust out-of-the-box features for subscription management. This makes it an excellent choice for content-heavy sites and those looking to build a strong subscriber base.

Resource Allocation to be provided:
* WordPress: 1 CPU (fair share), 750MB RAM
* Ghost: 1 CPU (fair share), 1000MB RAM
* Storage Limit: 5GB with a 20MB file size limit
* Transfer Limit: 100GB per month, 10GB daily limit

Hosting & Management:
The containers will be hosted and managed using a free license of EasyPanel. Hosting will be provided for a one-year term only, giving you the opportunity to host your site, learn, build, grow, and eventually migrate to a bigger host when ready. All you receive is an admin login for your website (Wordpress or Ghost), nothing else.

Important Notes:
* WooCommerce is strictly prohibited.
* File download and high bandwidth / transfer sites are prohibited.
* Using this service to redirect traffic is prohibited.
* Sales are not allowed to be processed on the server; nonprofits, for example, may direct to PayPal for donations or a store hosted elsewhere.
* Mailing is strictly prohibited, use a paid service or another server.
* Security: Guaranteed by EasyPanel product, free open-source version (no insurance provided). I've spoken to the owner, and he is very smart and maintains the platform well.
* No support will be provided.
* No service level agreement. Free is free with nothing attached, no guarantees.
* No future migration support will be provided; however, many free tools, forums, and hosts are available that will do this for you for free.
* Fair share usage is subject to CrunchBits' fair share rules. You will be accepting all terms from Crunchbits by applying for this offer, and they may be changed at any time.
* https://crunchbits.com/legal/tos
* https://crunchbits.com/legal/aup
* https://crunchbits.com/legal/privacy

Awards:
Only 3 awards will be provided to avoid any abuse of the server resources. Both WordPress and Ghost CMS users will receive a fair share of max 1 CPU. To request consideration, please fill the form linked below. Business and identity verification for security purposes may be required for nonprofit and personal requests. Community and open source projects can reference their public communities for evaluation and consideration. Community projects need a formal organized structure in order to be governed by the the rules outlined in important notes.

https://forms.gle/bNFhMPW3t8W4GcdNA

Award runs until end of Cyber Monday (when the clock strikes midnight after Monday). Cyber Monday is December 2, 2024.

Time to close: https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/winter?iso=20241203T01&p0=75&msg=Thank+You+to+the+Community:+Offering+Resources+for+Starter+Websites&font=cursive&csz=1

I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all the hard work done by the community, open source projects, nonprofits, and others. Your dedication and contributions are truly inspiring, and I am excited to support your efforts through this initiative. Stay warm and have a wonderful holiday season.

This opportunity has been pre-approved by @crunchbits over LES chat with me.

Take care.

I decided to give away 4, which later was increased to 8, Crunchy VPSes made with bashvm. Bashvm is an open source set of bash shell scripts from @babywhale that simplifies KVM VPS creation via libvirt, along with IPv6 and firewall management for IPv4 NAT.

The 8 Crunchy VPSes were sold quickly for a one time payment of $1.01 per VPS covering the entire period from March 11 until November 8. That's practically free!

You can still see the offer thread here: MetalVPS at Crunchbits: E3-1245, 2 vCores, 4 GB DDR4 ECC, 1000GB SSD RAID 10, 1 Gbps, $1.01 once!

All 8 Crunchy VPSes have been running continuously, in addition to a couple of small VPSes that @subenhon created manually via the command line. I have two test VPSes (currently shut down) and have occasionally run tinyproxy. Recently I started keeping some backup files on Crunchy as well.

Ubuntu and bashvm have handled the few Node updates seamlessly. The bashvm VPSes are set to restart automatically upon reboot.

I have logged in to Crunchy multiple times daily, checking load averages, running vnstat, and sometimes using tools like top or htop.

A couple of days ago, it struck me that Crunchy has been 100% available! There hasn't been even a single issue of which I am aware, nor have any of our Crunchy neighbors reported any problems. I've been particularly pleased with the lack of network issues. A new yabs is posted below.

Based on three months use by ten of us (8 VPS users, @subenhon, and myself), having zero problems is quite impressive! Congratulations to @crunchbits and @babywhale! Thanks again to @crunchbits for wonderful Crunchy!

I failed to install NetBSD on crunchy, my dedicated crunchbits server. The IPMI install setup seems successfully to get started installing from a known-working Ubuntu 22.04 ISO, but the NetBSD ISO errors out. The NetBSD errors are "invalid file offset" and "No such file or directory." The NetBSD errors can be seen in the last of the screenshots below.

The "Invalid file offset" error and the CDROM format are discussed at https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-bugs/2018/08/16/msg058532.html. Maybe "invalid file offset" means that no files could be read. In other words, maybe the "invalid file offset" error explains all the "No such file or directory" errors.

The problem might be with the NetBSD ISO. I'm sure crunchbits checked the SHA512 sum. And, happily, as also shown in the screenshots below, the NetBSD boot seems to begin okay prior to erroring repeatedly. But, maybe I chose the wrong ISO? Is there something about my IPMI boot setup, detailed below, that interferes with NetBSD but works with Ubuntu? What else could be wrong?

Here are the steps I followed.

Step 1 -- Ticket #DVO-787826 - Please add NetBSD ISO to crunchbits lineup

Thanks to crunchbits for uploading the NetBSD ISO!

Step 2 -- Launch The Console

Log in to the Crunchbits Server Management Panel. Click on Servers > Servername > Our Servername.

In the server's Management Panel, click CONSOLE.

We see a pop-up telling us that the Console will be available in a moment. A new tab opens showing the Console loading. Next, the newly loaded Console shows our server's login prompt.

Step 3 -- Set Console Window Auto-resize Preference

Here, our console window is displaced toward the right and toward the bottom of the screen. This happens because of the IPMI auto-resize feature. To disable auto-resize, in the console top menu bar, click Options > Preference. In the Preference window pop-up, select Window. Uncheck "Auto-resize window" and then click OK.

After disabling auto-resize, we see the Console window appearing approximately as expected.

Step 4 -- Load netbsd.iso Image

On the Console top bar menu, the first item on the left is Virtual Media. Click Virtual Media.

Then select Virtual Storage.

In the Virtual Storage dialog window, select ISO as the Logical Drive Type. Then, still in the Virtual Storage Dialogue window, we click on Open ISO (this choice shows as "Open I . . .").

A new "Open" dialog window appears. This window shows just one choice, ISOs. So, double click ISOs. Then we can see inside the ISOs folder. Find and select the netbsd.iso. Click the Open button.

Now we are back in the Virtual Storage dialog. The NetBSD ISO appears greyed out as /var/www/ISOs/netbsd.iso in the "Image Full Name and Full Path" box. It might be hard to see this in the screenshot.

Finally we click the "Plug in" button to connect the ISO file to the virtual CDROM. After we click "Plug in," we see "Device1 :VM Plug-in OK!!"

Click the OK button to close the Virtual Storage dialogue.

Step 5 -- Open the Virtual Keyboard

Here, from Chrome Browser on my daily driver Duet 5 Chromebook, it seemed that the next few upcoming steps did not work with my Chromebook's emulated function keys. Thus. I opened the IPMI's Virtual Keyboard.

In the Console top bar menu, click Virtual Media. Then click Virtual Keyboard. The keyboard shows in the Console Window.

Step 6 -- Set BIOS Options To Permit Booting From CDROM

Our crunchbits server was delivered with her BIOS set to LEGACY. We need to reset the BIOS in order to work with an ISO image. If we later resume using the crunchbits auto-installed images, we need to revert our changes to the BIOS. So, let's launch the BIOS Setup and make a record of the initial settings where we started.

Of the various methods for getting into the BIOS, what worked here was to launch the virtual keyboard and spam the F11 virtual key during the reboot process.

To reboot the server, choose Macro in the top menu bar of the Console window. Then, choose Macro again and Ctrl+Alt+Del in the submenu. The big CTRL + ALT + DEL button in the upper right of the Console didn't seem to work for me, regardless of whether the Virtual Keyboard was open or closed.

During the reboot, spamming the Virtual F11 key while the display keeps changing, brings us to the "Please select boot device:" menu. Here, we select Setup to enter the BIOS.

In the BIOS, use the Virtual right arrow key to move five steps from left to right across the top level Setup Utility menu from Main to Boot. Here we can see the boot sequence settings as our server was delivered by crunchbits. Again, we need to remember these settings if we decide to revert to using the crunchbits auto-installer. Again, note that the boot method originally selected is LEGACY.

It would seem that Legacy BIOS boot mode should work for most ISOs. However, here, it seems necessary to change the boot mode to UEFI and also to position CDROM ahead of the Micron hard drives in our server. So, we use the virtual "+" key to change Boot Mode Select to UEFI.

Here, the single change in the boot mode automatically also changed the boot sequence to UEFI USB CD/DVD:U . . . + UEFI CD/DVD + UEFI Hard Disk.

Save and exit with the Virtual F4 key followed by the Virtual Enter key to select Yes.

The boot sequence continues, and we see NetBSD beginning to boot.

But . . . there seems to be an issue! I closed the Virtual Keyboard so it wouldn't block reading the error messages.

Step 7 -- Test With Known-Working Ubuntu ISO

I switched to the Ubuntu 22.04 ISO and tried that. Like NetBSD, the Ubuntu ISO began booting. It took awhile, but the Ubuntu ISO successfully got all the way through booting and beginning the install process.

Step 8 -- Re-try NetBSD

I re-tried NetBSD, but saw the same issue as before.

Step 9 -- Try Booting From NetBSD ISO With Legacy Mode

I tried the NetBSD ISO after changing the BIOS back to LEGACY and the boot sequence to Network + CD/DVD + Hard Disk.

The result was that crunchy booted back into her current Fedora Rawhide installation on the hard disks. In other words, apparently neither the network boot nor the hoped for CDROM boot worked with LEGACY.

I double checked to make sure the netbsd.iso was selected and plugged in.

Conclusion -- Help Request

Happily, all the IPMI shennanigans didn't hurt the existing install. Nevertheless, the hoped for NetBSD install failed.

Can some kind person please help me figure out what was going wrong with the NetBSD install?

Thanks so much!

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