FreeBSD 11.4 End-of-Life | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD 11.4 End-of-Life

lists.freebsd.org

70 pointsrodrigo97514 comments

FreeBSD generally has a 5 year support life:

> Under the current support model, each major version’s stable branch is explicitly supported for 5 years, while each individual point release is only supported for three months after the next point release.

* https://www.freebsd.org/security/#model

And that largely applies here. FreeBSD 11 was released October 10, 2016.

FreeBSD 11 was a really good release, and FB 13 is just great!

Thank very much FreeBSD folks!!

I can't get FreeBSD working on Amazon Lightsail. Always says connection refused when trying to SSH in, even if I've opened up all the ports on the firewall. Any tips? Be really nice to finally play about with it for £2.50 a month.

I’ve run a LightSail FBSD for several years. It’s been very stable. You’ll need to ensure you have your sshd port open in the AWS security config and of course on any host based packet filter if you have one. A static IP is probably also something you’ll want, again in the AWS console.

The AWS Security is the normal cause - so if you're using an unknown OS try a known one first, get that working, then migrate the instance and IP to your new OS.

Vultr is really good, have multiple instances there and on Hetzner.

Connection refused means you're getting an RST back -- sshd isn't running. (Or isn't running yet.)

How long did you wait? 11.4 is very old so it's going to spend a while installing security updates.

Off-topic, but who is using this? $3.50 a month for a machine that was fine around 15 years ago. You can get a 4-core aarch64 server with 24 GBs of RAM for free from Oracle if you're willing to sell your soul to the devil. I did a few months ago, and it's been great sailing ever since.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free

That's insane. What's the catch here? I do scientific computing on my laptop and would love to offload some of that to the cloud. Am I going to get hung up somewhere after investing a bunch of time only to find out that it's not as useful as it sounds due to some obscure fine print?

There is no catch. I'm using it for a while without much problems.

No fine print. Even their data transfer limit (10 TiB out per month) works as advertised. I run a tor node which pushes ~9.5 TiB out each month, leaving half a terabyte for myself. No issues yet.

Watch out for:

> Resources identified as Always Free will not be reclaimed. After your Free Trial expires, you'll continue to be able to use and manage your existing Always Free resources, and can create new Always Free resources according to tenancy limits.

> However, Ampere A1 Compute instances are disabled when your trial ends and then deleted (terminated) after 30 days, unless you upgrade to a paid account. To continue using Arm-based compute instances as an Always Free user, you must delete your existing Ampere A1 Compute instances and create new Ampere A1 Compute instances.

FreeBSD VMs take a long time to spin up on LightSail.

If you're making a web server here's a simple install script:

https://cipherlog.blogspot.com/2021/02/being-bamf.html?m=1

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