Hello Vultr

It’s that time of year again, I went to apply FreeBSD updates last month and 11.0 is EOL, so I upgraded my couple of VMs to 11.1-RELEASE… and my IRC box at DigitalOcean never came back online. Check the console (tremendously buggy compared to Linode’s!) and sure as fuck, I’m bit by the same bug that I got caught by last time (though I don’t appear to have written about) where their symlinks point to the wrong place and networking fails to come up. Why they can’t just use DHCP or at least edit the configuration in a more resilient manner, I have no idea.

It just so happened that me getting angry at DO came in around the same time as my friend Avi setting up his anycasted IPv6 netblock using Vultr’s BYO ASN thing, and I noticed that they not only still had their Sydney location, but their Sydney location was no longer hampered by only Fast Ethernet port speeds. How they do 500GB for $2.50 in Australia, I have absolutely no idea, but it seemed pretty attractive, so I set up a Vultr account and spun up a VM in Sydney to have a look.

The setup was pretty painless, so I updated the box, installed my IRC stuff then copied the configuration over and I’m away. It’s been a couple of weeks now and so far the network has seemed pretty good - I lost connection to it once from my AussieBB connection, and it briefly flapped on two IRC networks (one connected in Europe and one in Western Australia, presumably both routing through the same internet exchange) for about 10 minutes, but two other networks (in the USA) were not affected. For the price, I’m pretty happy, and things are a lot snappier without 180ms or so of additional latency.

Horsham, VIC, Australia fwaggle

Published:


Modified:


Filed under:


Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Navigation: Older Entry Newer Entry