Just found a seemingly absolutely great VPS provider I’ve never ever heard of before: www.vr.org! Last result on google for ‘FreeBSD VPS’ on the first page — http://www.vr.org/os/bsd-hosting/freebsd-vps . Their price structure is similar to Linode, but they start out at 256MB/10GB/200GB with 2 CPUs at only 9,99 USD. Have a Looking Glass, many DCs all over the world, including San Jose andwww.vr.org! Last result on google for ‘FreeBSD VPS’ on the first page — http://www.vr.org/os/bsd-hosting/freebsd-vps . Their price structure is similar to Linode, but they start out at 256MB/10GB/200GB with 2 CPUs at only 9,99 USD. Have a Looking Glass, many DCs all over the world, including San Jose and Los Angeles, IPv6 support at each DC, and are even based out of San Jose, CA! Plus, www.vr.org, how cool is that? ;-)

vr.org seemed to have started offering FreeBSD only about last year or so, maybe that’s why I haven’t heard of them yet. However, I’m still amazed that I’ve never heard of such a huge global hosting operation.

Another interesting provider that is nqhost.com, based out of Eastern Europe (.cz), that started out just a couple of years ago, with some servers in the US, Germany and Russia. http://nqhost.com/freebsd-vps.html / http://ru.nqhost.com/freebsd-vps.html . 512MB/30GB/unmetered for 15 USD is a good deal, and, according to the Russian page, they do give out two CPUs! Supposedly, they do offer IPv6 on at least some locations (.de only, according to a support ticket), but they don’t officially advertise it. No West Coast locations.

First off, the FreeBSD documentation regarding Java is just terrible outdated.

However, it’s pretty easy once you get the gist. `pkg_add -r openjdk6` is all that was needed to get `java` and `javac` onto the FreeBSD 8.2 VDS 8-stable system. However, `pkg_add -r tomcat7` didn’t work as expected, since, apparently, it depends on java/jdk16, so it tries installing jdk-1.6.0.3p4_27, and fails, not installing tomcat7, either. Also, it seems like tomcat7 tries installing a bunch of other packages of questionable benefit, probably due to the java dependancy?

In any case, I guess just about all java software on FreeBSD (and is it only java software?) has to be installed with the —no-deps option. Indeed, `pkg_add -r —no-deps tomcat7` worked just perfectly fine, without any perl or python dependences that it seemed to try installing earlier just for tomcat7, and `/usr/local/etc/rc.d/tomcat7 onestart` was successful in bringing dependentless tomcat7 up and running, as casual on port 8080.

Anyhow, it shows a few things: documentation in FreeBSD is indeed very outdated; ports tree dependencies are still quite horrible and reasonably broken; yet Java actually seems to work on FreeBSD with little initial effort. :-)