(2016 note – Debian ended up winning!)
This took me a bit to figure out and almost had me switch away from FreeBSD to Debian! Oh my! Exciting I’m sure. Briefly this site was completely down due to this.
Anyhow if you update the core FreeBSD system (no need for this for ports) on a Rackspace instance you need to make sure that you recompile the kernel to keep the networking devices working. So after you do the normal FreeBSD updates be sure to do this also to add back in the old hypervisor stuffs you lose with the system update – this works on FreeBSD 9.0 and 9.1 at least:
- make buildkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
- make installkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
- shutdown -r now
If you find your network has changed from xn0 to re0 then you perhaps need to do this. That acceptance of what happened led me to the cure of the network not working at all. Thanks to here for saving me – http://www.rsecor.com/2013/01/03/rackspace-cloud-server-freebsd-9-0-to-9…
I did briefly try to see how quickly it’d be to move everything back to Debian and my gosh they have a confusing configuration file setup. You can have the 1 big file or the 10s of small files of configuration and it seems there’s no consistency to how to maintain these. I’m sure someone can correct me, I’d be glad to be corrected. I like Debian as a backup alternative. Anyhow I’d have had to relearn all my simple configurations just so I could re-apply my few changes to config files, no thanks! Just one simple file (in /usr/local/etc no less) like in FreeBSD, thanks.