Dedicated server share: Dual E5-2690v4, 128 GB, 2 x 960 GB SSD, 10G, Ashburn, VA USA NetBSD-current!

Comments

• mrclown Member

  August 20

  The moment you mentioned BSD, you don't need to describe the age or how long ago you started. That name a lone is sticked to oldies. Sounds like many of us are still active despite the age and new era.

  BSD is still lovely and stable regardless of adaptation rate worldwide.

  Thanked by 2Not_Oles jsg
• forest Member

  August 20

  Out of curiosity, why NetBSD rather than OpenBSD?

  Thanked by 1Not_Oles
• Tandoor Member

  August 20

  @forest said:
  Out of curiosity, why NetBSD rather than OpenBSD?

  Was thinking same. Isn't OpenBsd most secure? I have 2 VPs running OpenBsd

  Thanked by 1Not_Oles
• dbadude Member

  August 20

  @Not_Oles said:
  Friendly greetings!

  Traditional shell accounts! VPSes!
  Make your own VPSes from the command line!
  Super fast bare metal performance!
  See what's happening on your Node!

  What's new?

  No one here expressed interest in sharing this fine server when it was doing a great job running self-compiled FreeBSD-16.0-CURRENT.

  Now, NetBSD-current has been installed!

  To me, NetBSD-current seems really peaceful! In many ways!

  NetBSD seems still very much the same, but steadily improved, from thirty-ish years ago when I first became an occasional NetBSD user. For quite a while, back in the old days, I ran NetBSD-current on IBM z50 laptops as well as on my x86 desktop.

  Why NetBSD-current instead of a stable release?

  Over the years, NetBSD-current seems stable and dependable. I have compiled NetBSD-current thousands of times. NetBSD-current just seems to work reliably.

  I do remember once, my modem stopped working. I emailed the developer who had a recent commit. and got a fix in about twenty minutes. That fast reply was very helpful!

  The few NetBSD developers I have met do seem especially interested in NetBSD-current. So, if I want to ask a question, the NetBSD-current context might help my question pique developer interest.

  Of course, I'm certainly not a NetBSD expert. I'm more of a clueless™ user. So I do have many questions to ask!

  Besides being peaceful, versatile, and well supported, NetBSD also is lots of fun!

  I think I might stay with NetBSD for a while, and also stay with this nice QuickPacket server,

  If you want to share NetBSD and this nice server with me, please feel free to post here!

  Best wishes!

  Tom

  Specifications

  2 x E5-2690v4 (28 cores / 56 threads)
  128 GB DDR4 ECC RAM
  2 x 960 GB SSD
  1 x IPv4, more available
  1 x IPv6/64 and 1 x IPv6/48 HE Tunnelbroker.net
  250TB at 10G
  NetBSD-current
  Ashburn, VA USA

  Pricing

  The server is rented from QuickPacket for $85/month.

  It would be great if server neighbors contributed something toward the monthly rental.

  How to Get Shell Access

  Please post in this thread! Some optional questions you might want to discuss:

  What are you working on?
  Do you have a website?
  Do you have a source code repository?
  What do you want to run on our server?
  How much server resources might you use?
  How extensively do you want to fund our server's $85/month cost?
  Do Paypal and Zelle work for you?

  Terms of Service

  Free and open source software only.
  White hat only.
  For computer education and fun!
  Not for commercial use.
  No service level agreement.

  Warnings!

  Ephemeral. Could disappear at any moment!
  Clueless™ Administrator!

  More Information

  MetalVPS.com

  qp# sh tour
  Thu Aug 20 01:46:47 UTC 2026
  
   1:46AM  up  1:34, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
  
  kern.version = NetBSD 11.99.7 (GENERIC) #0: Wed Aug 19 09:28:39 UTC 2026
          [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC
  
  [     1.000004] cpu55: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz, id 0x406f1
  
  load averages:  0.00,  0.00,  0.00;               up 0+01:35:00        01:46:48
  23 processes: 22 sleeping, 1 on CPU
  CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
  Memory: 299M Act, 19M Wired, 17M Exec, 271M File, 122G Free
  Swap: 128G Total, 128G Free / Pools: 632M Used / Network: 
  
  Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail %Cap Mounted on
  /dev/wd1a      754G   2.2G   715G   1% /
  
          media: Ethernet 10Gbase-T full-duplex
  qp# 
  

  Anyone want to try guessing the commands in "tour"?

  vi tour

  date
  uptime
  sysctl -n kern.version
  dmesg | grep -E 'cpu[0-9]+: .*CPU' | head -1
  top -b | head -4
  df -h /
  ifconfig -a | grep media

  Thanked by 1Not_Oles
• Not_Oles Member, Patron Provider

  August 20

  @forest said:
  Out of curiosity, why NetBSD rather than OpenBSD?

  Hi @forest!

  There is FreeBSD too! Just ask Netflix!

  Recently I installed NetBSD at TierHive. The instance is 1 vCPU, 0.25 GB RAM, 1 GB SSD, which is, I believe, the smallest that TierHive made available. The instance works well, and setting it up was fun!

  Also recently, I was running a set of three VPSes, one each for self-compiled Free, Net, and Open. When I informally tested the network upload performance, Free won, then Debian, then Open, and Net was last. But I made a few adjustments, and then Net was first, way faster.

  There is not really any special reason that I prefer NetBSD. I love Linux and all the BSDs equally. NetBSD is very small, and very adaptable. So NetBSD is fun. I enjoy playing with it.

  @Tandoor said:

  @forest said:
  Out of curiosity, why NetBSD rather than OpenBSD?

  Was thinking same. Isn't OpenBsd most secure? I have 2 VPs running OpenBsd

  Hi @Tandoor!

  Congrats on your OpenBSD VPSes! That's great! You should definitely keep them! As for your question about security, I'm not an expert. But, like all of us, I have read posts and blogs with very different opinions about which BSD is most secure and why. Additionally, the security level might differ depending on what you are running and on your threat model. At the very least, OpenBSD has an excellent reputation for security across many years! I wish you good luck with OpenBSD!

  Best!

  Tom

  Thanked by 2forest Tandoor
• Arirang Member

  August 20

  Do you still have the servers you used to offer through the command line, or is this the only server/service you have now?

  Thanked by 1Not_Oles
• Not_Oles Member, Patron Provider

  August 20

  @dbadude said:

  vi tour

  date
  uptime
  sysctl -n kern.version
  dmesg | grep -E 'cpu[0-9]+: .*CPU' | head -1
  top -b | head -4
  df -h /
  ifconfig -a | grep media

  Hi @dbadude!

  Excellent! A few minor differences. Probably your tour is better than mine! Hiding the original, in case someone might prefer not seeing the original until later.

  Thanks for trying the little game!

  Best wishes!

  Tom

  qp# cat tour
  date
  echo
  uptime
  echo
  sysctl kern.version
  dmesg | grep 2690 | tail -n 1
  echo
  top -n 1 | head -n 5
  echo
  df -h .
  echo
  ifconfig | grep 10G
  qp# 
  
• Not_Oles Member, Patron Provider

  August 20

  @Arirang said:
  Do you still have the servers you used to offer through the command line, or is this the only server/service you have now?

  Hi @Arirang!

  Right now I have

  • Ryzen VPS, Linveo sponsored, Texas, self-compiled NetBSD-current
  • E3-1240v5, Hosteroid sponsored, Bucharest, NetBSD 11.0, @cmeerw helping with sysadmin
  • Dual E5-2690v4, Ashburn, QuickPacket, NetBSD-current (this thread's server)

  Usually I have something from Hetzner; more from Hetzner soon.

  Looking for lovely metal in USA West! If sponsored, I might give away free VPSes!

  Please see MetalVPS.com for more info and links to what people are saying.

  How about you? What do you have these days?

  Best!

  Tom

  Thanked by 1Arirang
• forest Member

  August 21

  @Not_Oles said: Also recently, I was running a set of three VPSes, one each for self-compiled Free, Net, and Open. When I informally tested the network upload performance, Free won, then Debian, then Open, and Net was last. But I made a few adjustments, and then Net was first, way faster.

  Oh that's interesting. What adjustments did you make?
• dbadude Member

  August 21

  What > @Not_Oles said:

  @dbadude said:

  vi tour

  date
  uptime
  sysctl -n kern.version
  dmesg | grep -E 'cpu[0-9]+: .*CPU' | head -1
  top -b | head -4
  df -h /
  ifconfig -a | grep media

  Hi @dbadude!

  Excellent! A few minor differences. Probably your tour is better than mine! Hiding the original, in case someone might prefer not seeing the original until later.

  Thanks for trying the little game!

  Best wishes!

  Tom

  qp# cat tour
  date
  echo
  uptime
  echo
  sysctl kern.version
  dmesg | grep 2690 | tail -n 1
  echo
  top -n 1 | head -n 5
  echo
  df -h .
  echo
  ifconfig | grep 10G
  qp# 
  

  I dont have any netbsd running, but tried some commands on linux to look if they output something similar. for the ifconfig i asked grok, because i knew for sure the ip stack had different control commands. the older ones like solaris.

  Thanked by 1Not_Oles
• Not_Oles Member, Patron Provider

  August 21

  @forest said:

  What adjustments did you make?

  Stuff from

  • https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/tuning_netbsd_for_performance/

  • https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-tuning.htm

  • https://omaera.org/wlog/tech/bsd_network_p2

  As an example from among several sets of commands that I tried:

  sysctl -w kern.sbmax=16777216
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto=0
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_auto=0
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=4194304
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=4194304
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max=16777216
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=16777216
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sack=1
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.congctl.selected=cubic
  

  Another thing I tried was sending the same file various different ways, for example with scp (sftp and rcp underneath), sftp, ftp, rsync, and netcat (which seemed to be the fastest).

  I am still just getting started with all this. I hear that Linux has similar settings but with slight differences in syntax. Maybe look at /etc/sysctl.conf.

  Maybe the above NetBSD settings aren't anywhere near the best. Probably the best settings depend on the specific context and the specific task the server is expected to perform.

  Hope you have a great day!

  Thanked by 2cmeerw forest
• forest Member

  August 22 edited August 22

  @Not_Oles said: sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.congctl.selected=cubic

  That's probably the big one. Linux uses cubic as its default congestion control algorithm.

  Thanked by 1Not_Oles
• cmeerw Member

  August 22

  @Not_Oles said: sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1
  sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sack=1

  I think this one is actually called net.inet.tcp.sack.enable, but both of these seem to be the defaults anyway.

  Thanked by 1Not_Oles