Section 2: What I tried and Why it Failed

This article gets quite technical… You’ve been warned.

OK, so I set my heart to getting FreeBSD installed on my server.  I was gonna change things… I was gonna have this cheap, lean, mean, servin machine.  I laid out what I was going to have to do.  I prepared for the anguish mentally.  I was going to use a program called the depenguinator to do a flat boot (after I added a line to the boot loader) to FreeBSD, which would then load in memory, which would then allow me to wipe the drive and install FreeBSD permanently.  Sounds like a pain in the ass right?  You have no Idea.

First off the man who wrote the depenguinator software assumed that I would have a swap drive to work with.  Linux most commonly has a swap partition.  If you turn off the swap partition Linux unlocks it, and when its unlocked you can copy your CD image of FreeBSD to it, and if you format it properly before you do that, you can tell grub to boot from it.  Try as I might, the way the godaddy server is configured, there is only 1 drive.  It has everything on it.  It’s 1 big Virtuozzo hard drive (we will get to virtuozzo in a minute).

OK, lets try plan B.  Linux has built into it a “Hardware Loop-back somethingorother”.  In layman’s terms, it allows you to mount a standard ISO file as its own drive.  Try as I might, I could not get the ISO to mount to it.  I tried punching the error messages into google only to find out that there is 2 reasons it can’t be done.  It takes up resources, so it is considered “unsupported” when used within virtualization software.  Problem number 2, Virtuozzo specifically disables it (at least the way godaddy has it configured), so that cannot be done.  My hair was falling out by the bushel.

So what is Virtuozzo you ask? A Virtual Dedicated Server is not Virtual without the Virtualization software.  What it does is, it simulates a complete computer system.  This means that godaddy (or anybody for that matter) can sell a virtual computer to you, and they can house many of these on a single set of hardware.  Virtuozzo has come up with an ingenious method of making this cheap and automated.  The server they create for you is based on 1 set of files.  This means that if you tell Virtuozzo you want to create 50 machines based on the customer(s) wanting to pay for the 29 dollar a month plan, then all 50 of those machines boot up from the same file set.  In other words, you can have 50 virtual machines, each with (the same) an operating system that takes up 1 gig, and the physical requirement, is the original 1 gig.  So if godaddy is running 50 Virtual Machines on 1 machine,  and each virtual machine has 10 gigs of space available, what godaddy’s physical hard drive requirement is is 451 gigs.  1 Gig for the operating system, which each machine only uses the same files, and that leaves each user with about 9 gigs times 50 Virtual machines.

There are exceptions: if a user changes a file, then virtuozzo will use the users version of that perticular file.  So on godaddy’s end, the software is great.  The problem is the way Virtuozzo handles the boot files means that the user (me) has no way to make any changes to them.  Which leads me to my 3rd and final attempt.

I wanted to change the boot files so that I could reboot my server from a boot server of my choosing (in this case my PC at home), which would then allow me to boot from FreeBSD remotely, then I could log into it, wipe the drive, and install FreeBSD.  With no way to access the boot files to begin with, there was no way I could even make that change.  So after wasting 3 days, first trying to fix my email server, and then trying to install FreeBSD onto my server, and finally giving up and reprovisioned my server with RHEL 7, My email server works again because it comes with Linux.

I intend to move my server to a company that can get me FreeBSD in the near future (when my godaddy hosting expires, I prepaid 1 year for it).  If you come up with a way let me know.

Not that I ever had anything against Linux… I just wanted… MORE…