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Comment by fxfan | Hacker News Reader

Should I run OpenBSD or Debian on my VPS, with arguments about security and (some) ease of usability?

You should run what you are familiar with as security is an ongoing process of updating, applying patches, so familiarity will make these chores easier.

Is there a good option for VPS hosting with OpenBSD? It receives minimal support from major providers which I'm aware. Which is unfortunate, since I personally find it to be a much nicer system to work with than the more popular operating systems.

Vultr will let you spin up an OpenBSD VPS easily, although as to how supported it is I'm not sure. I'm certainly happy with their Linux offerings.

I actually have an OpenBSD instance with 512mb of ram that costs $2.50/mo on Vultr and their support has been amazing. A while after upgrading OpenBSD to a new version, I noticed IPV6 wasn't working anymore. I didn't initially think it was the upgrade that did it, because I rarely ever thing about IPV6, so I opened a support ticket. I got a response back by someone obviously very familiar with OpenBSD with step-by-step instructions on what I needed to do after the upgrade to get back IPV6. It was pretty amazing for $2.50/mo!

I got $10 in free credit at sign up too. Very impressed with their service so far and OpenBSD is equally well supported as Linux. In case someone is looking for the very cheap plans, make sure to select Atlanta as the data center because some other locations in the US don’t have the cheapest plans.

Out of curiosity: Was it the IPv6 regression in 5.9?

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/299580/5132

Hmm, I can't remember exactly. It was either 5.9->6.0 or 6.0->6.1. I'm leaning towards the latter.

I use Vultr, and it works pretty well for a budget provider.

KVM (not joking)

If I had colo space, why not just run OpenBSD on bare metal and optionally use vmm? I want this precisely because I'm not in a position to host stuff physically myself.

I mean (forgive my heresy) using kvm(-the-hypervisor) under GNU/Linux to run guest OpenBSD. That is at least a very fast way to get started, spin up €2 instance somewhere, qemu -cdrom openbsd.iso and that's it.

You can upload a custom image to your digital ocean droplet.

Perhaps https://openbsd.amsterdam

https://openbsd.amsterdam/setup.html

this was posted here. I was intrigued but have not tried it (because my software relies on java 11, which is not on OpenBSD)

https://console.hetzner.cloud/ has OpenBSD 6.4. You must purchase a server with one of the four official Linux images first, then go server settings and from the iso images you can mount the OpenBSD install ISO and reboot. Use the server console to continue the installation.

As someone who was a heavy OVH user -- well, 100 or so dedicated servers -- and who just abandoned an attempt to migrate them to hetzner (who were slightly cheaper and offered NVME) -- let me suggest that you avoid Hetzner.

They blocked several critial IPs of mine without any warning, their support had absolutely no idea what the problem was and refused to unblock my IPs until I could convince them I'd solved the "problem" (which was an extra mac address appearing on one of my router addresses -- not an actual problem) and cost my business about 10k in the process. The email chain was... painful.

I've never had such a bad experience with a host before. YMMV of course, but I'm back on OVH and life is easy again...

Any of this should work.

https://ramnode.com/vps.php (kvm)

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

https://www.exoscale.com/compute/

https://openbsd.amsterdam/

https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices

You can install any Linux distro e.g. Centos with grub, copy OpenBSD install image to /boot and start it with grub. From now on you can just install it reformatting disk. You don’t need any particular support, standard KVM should be enough. Here’s guide I used recently and it worked just fine: https://archive.org/details/hpr2181

Depends on the software requirements you have, and perhaps on the network throughput you need.

For example java 11 is not, yet, a native option in any of the BSDs (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DF Bsd).

This is the reason I switched from FreeBSD to Debian about 20 years ago. Sad that it's still not an option.

java is definetely an option on all of the BSDs I mentioned. It just they did not have Java 11 ported to them yet.

But now since OpenJDK 11 is ported to FreeBSD, others, will follow.

Sorry if my comment was not clear.

IMO not having Java should be considered a positive. Java is wonderful in theory, but in practice it's likely been one of the most common recurring headaches in my IT management career.

For a platform where one of the key marketing points has always been "write once, run anywhere" it sure is apparently not only easy but seemingly encouraged to write software that only runs on a specific version of the JVM, often with key security features disabled.

Either Java itself sucks or Java encourages its developers to suck. I'm not sure which.

Obviously not all Java applications nor all Java developers suck, but there is a larger than normal amount of suckage in the Java universe.

> "Either Java itself sucks or Java encourages its developers to suck. I'm not sure which."

Neither. Java makes it easy for developers that suck to contribute. (The subtle difference here being that it won't make a good developer lose his competency.)

Incidentally this is why companies love java so much. Hiring a java developer straight out of college is much easier than hiring a C++ developer straight out of college. Arguably in the last few years Java's niche has been encroached on by other accessible languages with mild learning curves (golang, javascript/node, etc) but for years Java was the obvious choice if you wanted to hire cheap developers that could at the bare minimum fullfil the design requirements.

It definitely encourages its developers to suck.

More politely, it comes with non-removable training wheels, which makes it OK if you’re getting started as a developer, but a terrible choice for projects that will require experienced developers.

I would phrase that as "It doesn't encourage developers to get better."

Not my original wording, but it definitely includes roadblocks that prevent developers from progressing after a point.

Examples:

Type erasure means the standard library doesn’t quite use generics right, so you end up sprinkling unchecked casts all over the place.

It is nearly impossible to handle resource lifetimes correctly, even with autoclosables.

No unsigned types, so many advanced algorithms are neigh-impossible to express, let alone rediscover.

Encapsulation for primitive types comes with a high runtime overhead (cache misses, gc pressure)

Package-private doesn’t quite do what you want for large projects, where you want to split API implementations into multiple packages.

> Neither. Java makes it easy for developers that suck to contribute.

So do PHP and Visual Basic. Both of those languages are very well known for having a larger than normal amount of developer suckage, but they don't seem to have the same sort of fragility as Java. There are a lot of shitty Wordpress plugins out there, but never have I ran in to one that only worked on a specific narrow window of PHP releases in the same way as many terrible Java apps are with the JVM.

I've had the same experience. Whenever I have a misbehaving server, out of memory, slow performance, it almost always traces back to Java. However I don't think Java sucks necessarily. I think the sorts of software that people develop in Java, and the organizations that develop it, suck. In short, most Enterprise software sucks.

Note that it's not a lack of Java. It's a lack of Java 11.

* https://supernews.freshports.org/java/openjdk8-jre/

* https://supernews.freshports.org/java/linux-oracle-serverjre...

I don't think there is a package yet for OpenBSD but this has changed in FreeBSD as of 3 days ago:

https://supernews.freshports.org/java/openjdk11/

ah, this is great news. Thank you.

I have been monitoring this since October last year. Since now freeBSD has it, other BSDs should soon pick that up.

I noticed that freeBSD is bit like a 'mothership' as far as package ports go, to the other BSDs.

OpenBSD is great for a VPS, especially a small one. The minimal install has an incredibly short list of packages, which I like & feel helps keep everything working even over many years of following updates. It's just so much simpler than most Linux distros. But, familiarity or lack thereof can be very important- it's amazing how much is different about BSD, when we are used to thinking of it as a close cousin to Linux.

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