After several happy years with FreeBSD running in AWS I finally have switched to Digital Ocean. That happened a few days ago and was driven mainly by the lack of the console support which “aws ec2 get-console-output”, in my opinion, is certainly not.
After the upgrade to FreeBSD 11 I found my instance unreachable and had absolutely no clue what was wrong with it. In that situation “aws ec2 get-console-output” was totally useless with its succinct single-worded output – “Output”. Last time when I had a similar issue after another upgrade I at least was able to glean some helpful information with get-console-output to fix the problem. Not this time though.
So without further ado and armed with Tarsnap backups, I jumped on to DO’s bandwagon with ZFS and HTML5 console which, I hope, would be able to save me should I hit the same boot problem again. As an extra bonus, DO instance is a bit cheaper and beefier than the one I had in AWS. But as always… horses for courses.
Hi! And screenshot was also empty? 0o
Oddly enough, I’ve never heard about that feature. And even if I had tried it, it would’ve mostly been a waste of time, because certainly something very hairy was going on after the upgrade.
So I hit two birds with one stone: checked my backups and moved to DO to save a few bucks and build myself a slightly brawny VM with ZFS and boot environment support. Not bad, huh!