Re: installing on a VPS

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

Al,
  I have a friend who recently worked at Rackspace. Here is what he said, 
just in case it helps (I forwarded your original question to him):

Swift's Pal Says: 
> I'm sure it's possible to get the netbsd kernel/basic userland running 
> echo 'hello world' to the console, seeing as the virtual machine gives 
> you direct access to a virtual block device. But Even then I'm not 100% 
> sure it'd work because Rackspace uses a lot of custom PV drivers in its 
> xen implementation. E.g. there's a "supervisor domain" on each xenserver 
> that notifies an API when a customer dom's 'nova-agent' has started. 
> They do this over the xenbus. NetBSD won't have that in a vanilla build, 
> so in the rackspace console you'd see a vm in 'unknown' status; you 
> can't even see the console when it's in this state.

> TL;DR: Rackspace makes sure that the linuxes they support can boot and 
> be controlled by all their special services - they didn't design wide,
> just deep."

Perhaps this doesn't apply to you if you are renting a "real" server at 
Rackspace instead of renting a virtualized guest. YMMV.

-Swift