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Comment by clan | Hacker News Reader

Nice write-up. It should really not be that hard but unfortunately it is. And it is getting worse.

It made me sad to see that Hetzner had discontinued the FreeBSD rescue system. But it seems to be correct: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/freebsd-openzfs-via-...

How much did it really cost them to have the mfsbsd image available?

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For Hetzner and other dedicated servers, there is a prepackaged script to bootstrap FreeBSD from Linux: https://depenguin.me/.

Similar to what some other commenters said, booting into the Hetzner rescue system and installing FreeBSD from there is pretty straightforward.

I have some notes on doing that, including notes on my setup for disk encryption with FreeBSD on Hetzner:

https://gist.github.com/ctsrc/9a72bc9a0229496aab5e4d3745af0b...

Well, an alternative approach for their bare metal boxes is to request a KVM and link whatever image you in the KVM request form. They will then download it, put it into a USB stick, and plug in the KVM and USB stick. In my experience, you will have it all set up within the hour.

This is of course easier (although the KVM software is a heap of proprietary arse with a web interface or ancient Java blob), but if you are truly paranoid you will have to trust the Hetzner staff and their software stack not to bring something undesired along with your provided image.

Just a sidenote, in my experience, over the part year or so, Hetzner has finally switched to more modern KVMs with good HTML5 consoles. The Java applet was indeed a pain.

I know as well that they are often impressively quick to respond.

But it is not the initial setup I am really worried about. It is those fan meet fecies moments. Being able to respond to a situation instantly. Mfsbsd was a godsend.

Trying to fix problems on one OSis from a different OS is a much harder issue. Especially under pressure.

I would much rather have seen they added OpenBSD to their PXE environment. Just the vanilla stuff - no fancy optimizations.

Tbh, it's not that "hard" nor is it hard to make it more convenient.

I've actually built a small tool that has the UX of regular SSH but under the hood reboots into rescue, configures the keys and opens an SSH session. Once you close it, it reboots back into regular mode.

I've wrapped that tool again to then build a tool that takes just an ignition config and automatically images a hetzner server with fedora coreos using that config.

You could easily build your own tool that reboots into rescue, installs a VM, mounts all the necessary devices, boots the OS image, and exposes the serial console of that VM to you.

It took me a while to learn to love Hetzner's solution, but I prefer it over having to use shitty proprietary KVMs.

To be fair, it's only that hard because the author wanted to do it without KVM. As they note getting KVM access for a Hetzner server is only a short message to support away. Last time I requested it (to change BIOS settings) I got it within 5 minutes.

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