After reading all the comments, I believe I must precise, that I am aware of most of the mentioned alternative techniques.
Most of these only work as long as remote screen/keyboard control access is possible throughout a cloud panel (VNC).
My goal with this article was to avoid any third party control and making it to works even on a remote linux desktop pc used as a server.
Thanks for all the feedbacks, I appreciate it.
Very neat, thanks for sharing.
I've played similar tricks mounting a ramdisk, copying things in to it, starting daemons from it, then force-remounting rootfs read-only, then doing things you can't normally do. This takes things quite a bit further, and I like it.
I've never quite understood the details of Linux boot methods. This article is wonderful because it doesn't just say what to do, but explains what's going on, and in detail. Can't wait to try!
I think prgmr.com (now known as Tornado VPS apparently) still does:
Edit: looks like no more Netbsd dom0’s with prgmr, but their docs on netinstalling netbsd don’t look entirely headache-inducing..
Some providers off the top of my head:
prgmr.com (now tornado vps apparently) - long-standing provider - they used to have netbsd dom0’s but now it’s all Linux based it looks like so appears you have to netinstall netbsd in your vm now)
buyvm.net - reasonable pricing and have bsd available to install (can’t remember if template or iso ready to mount/install)
https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/ - excellent value / been around forever (they offer custom iso)
I will add more here as I think of them..
I wrote that article because in specific locations that are out of the US and Europe, the offering might be even narrower.
This was not made out of despair finding a nice provider, but because I found the technical challenge interesting (enough to share).
There's lots of ways if you have access to common cloud primatives (replacement root volume, etc) and have some creativity.
I did appreciate this post though because it's for a way I haven't used before.
I must say I made the basic git clone on Marcan's repository (named like this) without changing the default name.
Then I just put my additions next to and into it.
This did not look bad to me. Otherwise I would have done it differently.
I made the two ls commands to show all files and avoid any confusion.
Obviously the only reason they even wrote a shell script in the first place was so that they could name a repo after it, so that it would have the side effect of making a directory of the same name, so that they could enact their plan to trick you into...something.
Really dude?
OpenBSD has an installation ramdisk. Just boot that.
See https://raby.sh/installing-openbsd-on-ovhs-vps-2016-kvm-mach...
I've also seen "dd if=path/to/install/ramdisk /dev/sd0" and reboot; depends on being classic BIOS not uefi. Can't find the link tho.
The method mentioned in the link you shared is indeed interesting and probably also works with NetBSD among others, but relies on having third party controls
(such as having to select a grub entry and run the installer steps from a cloud control panel).
The reason I experimented and wrote this article was because I thought interesting to find a way to avoid having to rely on any external controls.
Thus this works even on bare metal servers and thanks to QEMU to install absolutely any OS that can boot on QEMU.