RootBSD

All of our FreeBSD VPS services come with the ports tree pre-installed. These are third-party applications that have been adapted to be used in FreeBSD. They cover an extremely diverse range of functions including accessibility, graphics, multimedia, networking operations, browsing, science and engineering and more.

This means that if you want to do something specific in FreeBSD you probably won’t need to do much work in order to get those functions and features. Depending on your level of familiarity with programming and FreeBSD you can choose how to install these programs. If you’re more tech-savvy and know your way around major programming languages then you might be interested in installing the source code for the programs, either from the ports tree or by installing it on your own separate from the ports tree.

When you install a port from the ports tree, you are basically running an ‘autorun’ type script that will download the source code of the program, compile, and install it locally. If you’re not familiar with a Makefile and compiling source code into binaries then you may be more interested in the Packages collection which allows you to directly install the binaries (executables) and not worry about doing the compiling and installation process. The collections allow you to directly install the applications from local media or directly from the network so you don’t need to worry about storing everything locally if you don’t need it.

The major benefits to installing from Packages include: smaller download, faster installation, no need to compile. The major benefits for installing from the Ports collections include: ability to tweak the performance and options of the applications and able to build-in specific functions that might not be activated in a pre-compiled binary.

Finally, both Ports and Packages are dependency aware which means they know what they need to function properly and can tell you or install the libraries as they need. This means that you should almost always be able to get up and running with the new applications in no time flat. Good Luck!

For more information see the FreeBSD Handbook:

• Chapter 4 Installing Applications: Packages and Ports

Unfortunately we had a programming problem on part of our website.  Messages sent through the ‘contact’ form have not been received.  This is now fixed.

If you have sent us a message and not received a response, please contact us again.  We apologize for the inconvenience and promise we weren’t just trying to ignore you.

Finally after a few delays, our new website is finally finished and online.  We’re pretty happy about this, as our original website design was functional but not very pretty (at all).  Sorry for any snafus during the transition as there may have been a few broken links while we were tying everything together on the new site.

For those that don’t remember, here is what our old site looked like.  It was a black and green color scheme, and the text wasn’t always easy to read.   The new site looks relatively modern and focuses on ease-of-use, instead of … looking kind of weird.  The old original ASCII logo wasn’t as catchy as it used to be in the 1990s.

If you have been assigned extra IP addresses for a Xen VPS, here is how to configure them in your FreeBSD server.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have added new RRD graphs to our control panel for Xen virtual servers. This allows customers to easily track their CPU usage and network throughput. For customers with Xen VPSs, the graphs can be found by logging in to your RootCP control panel and looking under the status screen.

Check it out:

We have made some upgrades to memory limits on our FreeBSD VPS service. Our entry-level plan, Iota, now comes with 256MB of RAM, quite a deal for only $19.97 including our best in class server hardware and capable FreeBSD 6.2 OS setup.

All of our VPS plans received memory upgrades, which applies immediately to existing customers as well. for only a $29.97/mo you can step up to our Lambda VPS plan with a whopping 512MB of RAM to let you run plenty of web apps.

Have you ever noticed that on some Internet connections, ssh sessions will drop for no reason other than a lack of activity? I have noticed this when using ssh from some open access points and friends houses. The reason isn’t a poor internet connection but actually a poor router. Most home/office routers perform NAT to connect users on a private network to the public Internet. The router must keep table open of what connections are active, connecting local IP addresses to remote servers. The problem is that if a TCP session (such as ssh) doesn’t send data after awhile, the router will think it timed out and remove it from its NAT connections table. This results in a dropped ssh connection.

To workaround this, you can setup a keepalive on your ssh connection. The keepalive will send a heartbeat check between the client and server, so the session stays active and doesn’t look dormant. You can configure this in the Windows client, putty, or you can configure it in opensshd on your FreeBSD vps.

To set this up, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config on your VPS or server and add:

ClientAliveInterval 300
ClientAliveCountMax 3

This will have sshd send a heartbeat every 5 minutes (300 seconds) and allow for up to 3 missed heartbeat responses before considering the session dead.

You must then restart sshd to apply the settings:

/etc/rc.d/sshd restart

Cheers

We have made disk space upgrades on the two lowest (and most popular) VPS Plans:

• Iota VPS ($19.97/mo) is upgraded from 5GB disk to 10GB disk
• Lambda VPS ($29.97/mo) is upgraded from 15GB to 20GB disk

All customers that are currently on either of these plans will see the upgrade immediately.   Enjoy!

Streaming music on FreeBSD can be very easy with the right applications. I will be outlining how to stream music using the Music Player Daemon and Icecast.

Unfortunately for some reason the Music Player Daemon (mpd henceforth) is set up to not compile with support for libshout which is needed for it to play with Icecast. Luckily as long as you have libshout (/usr/ports/audio/libshout) installed getting mpd to install with support for it is fairly simple. Navigate to /usr/ports/audio/musicpd and open up the Makefile in your favorite editor. Somewhere around line 40 should be a line that reads ‘CONFIGURE_ARGS= –disable-shout’, change this to read ‘CONFIGURE_ARGS= –enable-shout’ and it should compile just fine. Why this option is explicately disabled I do not know but hopefully it will be fixed in the near future. If you go poking around in the Makefile and aren’t able to fine the line to change they may have already fixed it.

Anyway, install musicpd now followed by Icecast (/usr/ports/audio/icecast2). I also installed phpMp, a web interface for mpd to manage the stream and playlists. It can be found in /usr/ports/www/phpmp. After everything is installed go to /usr/local/etc/ to do the configuring. Along with this post are two example configuration files, mpd.cond and icecast.xml for their respective applications. In my mpd.conf I have created a user to place all the required files under. If you use the web interface this users home directory will really only have a database file used by mpd in it along with a log. If you wanted you could create a public_html for the user and run phpMp out of it. In the configuration file for mpd you will need to update the paths if they are different, the stream name if you so desire, and connection information for Icecast (host, port, password). The password and other connection details you choose should be specified the same in icecast.conf. Working from the top down in icecast.xml you should first change/specify the source and relay passwords under authentication (the one used for mpd should also be used here), the administrative username and password, the hostname for the server, and the port to run on. Unless you need to change logging information the rest should be alright.

Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the lines ‘icecast_enable=”YES”‘ and ‘musicpd_enable=”YES”‘. Then do ‘/usr/local/etc/rc.d/icecast start’ followed by ‘/usr/local/etc/rc.d/musicpd start’. If Icecast started correctly you should be able to load the status page at http://hostname:portnumber. Once you have verified that Icecast is running correctly test mpd by executing ‘mpc add <some>’ and then loading /stream.ogg from Icecast. If you can hear the music playing then congratulations, you have properly set up Icecast and musicpd.Musicpd Configuration
Icecast Configuration

Hey everyone. Just getting an announcement out there about some new scripts that have been added to the jails of all our VPS users.  We have added scripts to view memory usage, view disk usage, reboot, and halt from within the jail (i.e. on the command line).  All of this has been available through the web-based RootCP but now it is even easier to check if you are logged in to a shell.  The reboot and halt scripts have actually been around for a while but it seems that we never got around to announcing them before.

Reboot 

The binaries for the scripts are called “reboot”, “halt” (these are direct replacements for their normal counterparts).  Once you halt your VPS, you will need to login to RootCP to start it up again since you will be, well, locked out of your shell.

Resource Usage 

To see your RAM usage:  jmemstat

To see your disk usage:  jdiskstat

Do you have ideas for other improvements we could make?  Send them to us!  Have a problem?  Drop an email to support@rootbsd.net and let us know.