Deth

I am considering switching from a VPS to a dedicated server again. There is no reason for me to do so besides the fact that I want to have a chance to play with something else. They can be had fairly cheap these days and be more than powerful enough to suit my needs.

I decided to try out one company’s, but I ran into a dilemma with it. They only had Linux images available. Sure, I could have probably made it available to me if I contacted customer support, but I wanted to have the challenge of solving it myself. I googled for some direction and came up with the idea of installing the USB stick image onto my second drive. Luckily, my server came with an SSD and a larger hard drive. Linux is on the SSD, so I DDed the USB. That allowed me to reboot and choose the boot drive to start up the FreeBSD USB image.

From there, it was just as if I were installing it from the USB stick. It was a fun challenge and I learned some new things, or at least applied them in ways I didn’t think of before.

One of the things that attracted me first to Linux and finally to FreeBSD is the ability to do basically anything with the command line. It does exactly what you tell it to do, and nothing more or less. It doesn’t think for you. With that power, it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

It would certainly have been nicer if I could have just mounted the image and booted into that without the extra steps, but it worked out to what I wanted in the end.