gdt's notes on VPS

There is a version of grub that uses paravirtualized operations (rather than BIOS calls) to load the operating system, and also has support for a xen-specific handover to the domU kernel from grub. Many xen providers support it, typically in order to let people run their own Linux kernels, but pv-grub appears to be the best path for running one's own NetBSD kernel (whether or not the VPS provider explicitly supports NetBSD).

http://www.panix.com/corp/v-colo/vplans.html http://www.panix.com/corp/v-colo/grub.html

Panix is in New York, uses xen. A colleauge has a VPS there (providing backup DNS for me), and it has been very reliable — it seems there is a reason to reboot it about every year, but uptimes of about 6 months are normal, and I can't remember an outage of more than about 15 minutes over several years.

Panix explicitly supports NetBSD, where the kernel is loaded from the dom0 in the traditional way. However, that tends to be the stable release kernel (NetBSD 5.1 on 2012-02-08). Their web pages say they support PV-GRUB, which should allow running a custom kernel (with IPSEC, perhaps puffs, and compiled from recent netbsd-5 sources) and should allow running -current.

It's not clear if panix has IPv6 support.

Generally, panix seems like an excellent choice; my only hesitation is an attempt to get better geographical and provider diversity (relative to my secondary DNS at panix already).

http://www.linode.com/

Linode has multiple facilities, including several in the US. Some facilities, including Atlanta, have native IPv6.

Linode does not provide support for NetBSD, but does support pv-grub. This is somewhat kludgy in that one has an ext2fs partition that contains the grub files and the kernel, and then a different ffs root partition. It's not clear how hard it is to end up with a single ffs partition, or if pv-grub supports ffs.

A NetBSD user reports that he has been successfully running NetBSD on linode.

http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/NetBSD_Howto http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/NetBSD_howto http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/PV-GRUB http://library.linode.com/linode-platform/custom-instances/pv-grub-howto https://www-loadbal1.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=41274&sid=94ce0b6a4575ff15b5948c520c53bea4 http://www.hungryhacker.com/os/freebsd-on-linode/

It appears there was a security failure at linode leading to stolen bitcoins: http://bitcoinmedia.com/compromised-linode-coins-stolen-from-slush-faucet-and-others/ http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.html

There are AMIs for NetBSD. But, there is no way to get at the console of a VPS, and that seems awkward.

http://bsdvm.com/

bsdvm uses vmware.

http://www.dbihosting.com/

There is an inexplicable $5/month charge to run BSD instead of Linux.

http://www.bigvps.com/

http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophilia/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590993

This appears to be a small operation, a bit less expensive, and either less reliable or more open about status (hard to tell). They are currently only taking yearly signups, and recently weren't taking new customers.

They provide instructions for installing NetBSD: http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/NetBSD_as_a_DomU

http://www.rapidkvm.net/faq

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/

Rackspace is in the US and uses xen, but appears to have no interest in supporting customers running NetBSD.

http://www.dataslab.com/

It's hard to tell much about dataslab at all. Already this page is the top hit for "dataslab NetBSD"…

Slicehost appears to be part of rackspace now. Before, it seemed difficult to run BSD on it.