1. Yes, you are responsible for setting up the VPS as you see fit. You are given web-based console with which to carry out the installation from the installation disk. There is an unformatted hard drive available so essentially what you get is what you would see if you booted up into a FreeBSD disk with a computer that has a blank hard drive.
2. I do not know if RamHost provides remote copies of the ports tree. I ran into the problem of insufficient inodes for ports tree too. There are three things that you can do:
- Don't use ports, install using packages. For example
pkg_add -r rsync
- Ask RamHost for a disk space upgrade. This will give you more room for inodes and you will have the full ports tree. Since I needed the kernel source as well I went with this route. The relevant part of the handbook is here.
- When setting up your drive, specify the number of inodes you need. I tried this at first but when I realized that I needed the kernel source, I got the disk space upgraded and did not run into insufficient inodes issue.
3. I ran into problems while running freebsd-update. Trying to upgrade to 9.1-RELEASE always gave me an error. I asked RamHost about this and they responded that it was due to a KVM issue and that I would not be able to install 9.1-RELEASE on the VPS. I have 9.1-RELEASE on a different KVM based VPS so maybe the problems stems from a specific version of KVM? Since 9.1-RELEASE would not work I went back to the 8.X line. I am running 8.4-RELEASE-p1 on my TinyKVM.
Manas