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<article>
  <h2>The thing that happened</h2>
  <p>
    I have noticed really bad inbound latency on the VPS I host this site
    on. Way slower than what <a href="https://skhron.eu">skhron</a> says it
    should be on their site so clearly something was up. I noticed when pinging
    <a href="https://example.com">example.com</a> the first ping took a while
    but after that it was fine compared to pinging its IP address which was
    pretty much instant so clearly the DNS server was shit. While doing this I
    had the VPS dashboard open and saw DNS server settings which I assumed
    (assuming things often lead to bad outcomes) would change something on the
    DHCP server. After that I noticed the network on the VPS go completely
    down. Only way I could get in was with VNC and from the server I couldn't
    ping anything not even IP addresses. After changing back to the default DNS
    the issue continued. Turned out there is no DHCP the VPS server just
    configures everything statically with some scripts and it messed up. I use
    freebsd which wasn't well tested by whoever made that system so it nuked
    itself.
    <br /><br />
    Even after turning on manual mode and setting up the networking by
    hand it was still fucked. The only thing I backed up was my git repos. All
    the configs (some of them a pain in the ass to make) were stuck on there
    without any way to get them off except painfully hand copy with the 80
    column VNC display. Linux live environments don't support zfs and the
    drivers to make that happen require rebooting which live environments reset
    on boot. Uploading freebsd live images to the VPS would be painful due to
    the stuppa way it handles them.
    <br /><br />
    Because I didn't want to go through any of those things I contacted tech
    support (I hate contacting those types of places). Most places have an
    under powered LLM running the show, people who have good writing/talking
    skills but have computer skills limited to using word processors and web
    browsers, over worked intern who has million other things on their
    mind... Skhron turned out to be one of the rare gems that has tech support
    that not only knows what they are doing but also has the time/will to do
    so. The tech support person actually took the time to recreate the issue on
    another freebsd instance while most tech support people by now would have
    sent a copy pasted corporate answer that translates to "go fuck
    yourself". After a few hours they sent a manual route config which fixed it
    and they also said to configure DNS from <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>
    instead.
  </p>

  <h2>What was learned</h2>
  <p>
    Less so when using more popular operating systems on a VPS but do be
    careful with dashboard settings that might be changing things in the
    operating system itself instead of on the network and VM. If you can
    preform a task from a config file that is often the safer choice because
    you don't know what the fuck the VPS dashboard is doing behind the
    scenes. Also anything you don't want to loose make backups of because even
    if you do everything right things will still fuck up! If this issue wasn't
    fixed a fresh install would have been the only other option. If up time is
    important for you then automatic backups and full backups are a must
    have. Regardless keep an offline backup of important things on your own
    hard drive.
  </p>
</article>