DragonFly on DigitalOcean

[Steve Petrie, P.Eng.]

Greetings To The DragonFlyBSD Forum,

Around one year ago I installed DragonFlyBSD from ISO image, on a QEMU / KVM virtual server at www.elastichosts.com (EH)
.
I plan to use DragonFly to host a website I am developing that has static content plus two fairly simple PHP + SQL apps.

My business strategy is to run DragonFly on QEMU / KVM virtualization, because this widely-used VM standard ensures lively price competition among plenty of VM hosting providers. I am happy to accept the higher overhead of QEMU / KVM, as compared to other more aggressive specialised VM architectures, in exchange for wider VM portability and a deeper VM supply market. 

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I chose DragonFly as the server o / s, mainly for its reputation for reliability and efficiency, and for the robustness of the the HAMMER filesystem. The support of a solid team of open source developers for DragonFly, also attracted me.

After some minor fiddling around and one tweak of the QEMU / KVM configuration by EH tech support, DragonFly was booting fine. And readily accessible through both VNC console and SSH console.

A year ago, after that DragonFly installation work, I had to redeploy my time deal with other projects, so the DragonFly QEMU / KVM at EH has been idle until now.

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I am now porting the website PHP app from using MySQL to using PostgereSQL, expectong Postgres to be a more robust database server. That SQL migration work is done on a different development system, not the QEMU / KVM DragonFly VM..

When the PHP SQL porting task is finished, I will be returning to DragonFly on the EH QEMU / KVM (and to more active participation in the DragonFly forum:), to continue working with setting up DragonFly. Probable first step will be to upgrade DragonFly to the latest stable release.

Last year, when I paused the  DragonFly work, I had installed and was configuring the Fish Shell (fishshell.com) as the (non-emergency) regular working shell. But since then I have been following the fish shell users forum fish-users at lists.sourceforge.net and the seemingly (to me) casual attitude of fish shell developers, to breaking existing fish shell scripts, with new shell version releases, has convinced me to switch to try using the MKSH shell, instead with DragonFly.

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I can't yet speak to the speed or dependability of DragonFly, under any kind of live production workload on the QEMU /KVM at EH, but I have high hopes of rapid throughput and great reliability.

Regards,

Steve

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Steve Petrie, P.Eng.

ITS-ETO Consortium
Oakville, Ontario, Canada
apetrie at aspetrie.net

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Zachary Crownover 
  To: Justin Sherrill 
  Cc: users at dragonflybsd.org 
  Sent: Friday, December 11, 2015 3:42 PM
  Subject: Re: DragonFly on DigitalOcean


  Vultr works quite well, but you have to submit a support ticket to unblock SMTP traffic from your system, otherwise mail will just pool up on the system and you'll see weird things like 50+ concurrent instances of dma running.


  On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Justin Sherrill <justin at shiningsilence.com> wrote:

    If they (or any other provider) offers an "install from ISO" option,
    you can buy one of the other instances and see if you can upload/use
    the DragonFly ISO as an installation media, installed over whatever
    premade operating system is already present.  There's a number of
    people who have been trying that lately at various VPS providers -
    Netcup, Vultr, etc.


    On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Pierre Abbat
    <phma at leaf.dragonflybsd.org> wrote:
    > Several days ago I set up a server on DigitalOcean. They offer several Linux
    > distros and FreeBSD, but no other BSD. How hard would it be for them to offer
    > DragonFly? They use Bochs for virtualization.
    >
    > Pierre
    > --
    > sei do'anai mi'a djuno puze'e noroi nalselganse srera
    >






  -- 

  Sincerely,

  Zachary Crownover
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