FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE on GCP free tier

freebsd_on_gcp_free_tier.md

FreeBSD on GCP free tier

Account

Create a GCP account, accept the terms, etc.

NOTE: There are ton of details skipped here such as the VPC, firewall, etc. this is just a quick introduction :)

SSH keys

First, create the ssh-keys:

Metadata

• Key: sshKeys
• Value: <yourusername>:ssh-rsa <yourkey> <yourusername>

ssh-keys

Just paste your public key (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)

For more information, see the official documentation.

Instance details

The free tier is limited to:

• Certain regions (I choose us-central1 in this case)
• 30 GB HDD (I chosse 29 GB just in case)
• f1-micro size (¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

See https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier#always-free for more information

Instance creation

Create the instance using the cloud console (or the gcloud cli if installed) as:

gcloud compute instances create INSTANCENAME \
  --image freebsd-12-0-release-amd64 \
  --image-project=freebsd-org-cloud-dev \
  --zone "us-central1-c" \
  --machine-type "f1-micro" \
  --network "default" --maintenance-policy "MIGRATE" \
  --boot-disk-size "29" \
  --boot-disk-type "pd-standard" \
  --async

Connect to the instance

After a while, the instance will be available. See the instance details with gcloud compute instances list:

gcloud compute instances list
NAME     ZONE           MACHINE_TYPE  PREEMPTIBLE  INTERNAL_IP  EXTERNAL_IP     STATUS
freebsd  us-central1-c  f1-micro                   10.128.0.2   35.239.255.111  RUNNING

Then, connect with the proper key to the public IP:

ssh <myuser>@35.239.255.111