As I often say, I like simplicity and predictability. My servers are generally built around that principle: the server itself (physical or virtual) is just a coordinator of containers. When it's based on FreeBSD, those containers take the form of jails and VMs. In case of disaster, restoring is simple, and I talked about it at EuroBSDCon 2026 in Brussels . But there's another operating system that

I have written before about putting a cache in front of snac , and more recently about the HAProxy layer in front of FediMeteo . The general idea is always the same: the reverse proxy should absorb the repetitive, public work that has no business reaching the application server. This post is the same idea applied to a much louder neighbour: a Mastodon instance. The instance is mastodon.bsd.cafe ,

I use Apple devices very often. Overall, I like macOS. Certainly more than Windows. One of the things I find extremely useful is a command I discovered not too long ago: pbcopy . pbcopy can be used to copy to the clipboard whatever it receives from standard input. For example, when I am in a shell, I often use a command like this: cat filename.md | pbcopy At that point I know that the content of t

I have already written about how FediMeteo was born , and about how HAProxy helps reduce the number of requests that reach snac . Seen from the outside, FediMeteo almost seems still. There is a static homepage, regenerated every hour. There are the city pages, with their forecasts. There are RSS feeds waiting to be fetched, JSON objects waiting to be requested, Fediverse instances refreshing data,

When I wrote about FediMeteo for the first time, I told the story from the beginning: the idea born almost by chance while checking the weather for a holiday, the memory of my grandfather, who for years had been my personal meteorologist, the decision to build something small and useful, and then the surprise of seeing people actually use it. What began as a personal experiment quickly became a sm

LibreNMS has been a faithful companion for years now. It quietly handles the monitoring of my servers, devices, and services without demanding much in return - exactly what you want from a tool whose job is to watch over everything else. It's a solid alternative to heavier solutions like Zabbix, and it gives you alerts, data, and graphs on virtually anything reachable over SNMP. I usually install

Yesterday morning, first thing after waking up, I checked my emails. One of them was from a client - a sharp person, but not a tech expert - forwarding a message from one of their "digital marketplaces". They claimed that during site crawling, their bot upgrades the connection to HTTP/2, and that this somehow causes issues on their end, so they were asking us to disable HTTP/2 to fix the problem.

When I first laid eyes on the FreeBSD Handbook , back in 2002, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Six years of Linux, a relationship I've written about elsewhere , across various distributions, had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. Here was an operating system that came with a complete, accurate, up-

Many of my clients do not use Microsoft systems on their desktops; they use Linux-based systems or, in some cases, FreeBSD. Many use Apple systems - macOS - and are generally satisfied with them. While I wash my hands of it when it comes to Microsoft systems (telling them they have to manage their desktops autonomously), I am often able to lend a hand with macOS. And one of the main requests they

Introduction FreeBSD continues to make strides in desktop support, but Linux still holds an advantage in hardware compatibility. After running openSUSE Tumbleweed on my mini PC for several months, I decided it was time to switch to a solution I could control more closely. Not because Tumbleweed doesn't work well - it works great! - but I prefer having direct control over what happens on my machine

I know, this title might come as a surprise to many. Or perhaps, for those who truly know me, it won’t. I am not a fanboy. The BSDs and the illumos distributions generally follow an approach to design and development that aligns more closely with the way I think, not to mention the wonderful communities around them, but that does not mean I do not use and appreciate other solutions. I usually publ

Update : This post has been updated to include Docker benchmarks and a comparison of container overhead versus FreeBSD Jails and illumos Zones. Note : Some operating systems (FreeBSD and Linux) support kernel TLS (kTLS) and the related SSL_sendfile path in nginx, which can improve HTTPS performance for static files. Since this feature is not available on all the systems included in the comparison

Mastodon 4.5.0 is here, and with it come some interesting changes that, in my opinion, might encourage more people to consider it for self-hosting their Fediverse community. While it may not be as lightweight and simple as other solutions (like snac or GoToSocial or many others), I believe it remains one of the best platforms for managing a medium-sized Fediverse community, thanks in part to the d

Author's Note: Before we begin, an important clarification. What follows is a horror story based on real events from my career. However, to protect the privacy of the people and companies involved, I have deliberately mixed things up: technologies, contexts, and specific details have been modified or merged with other experiences. I therefore invite you to read this story not as a strict chronicle

Disclaimer These benchmarks were performed on my specific hardware and tuned for the workloads I expect to run. They should not be taken as absolute or universally applicable results. Different CPUs, storage, networking setups, or workload profiles could produce very different outcomes. What I’m sharing here is a faithful snapshot of my test environment and use case - a guidepost, not a final verd

Introducing the illumos Cafe: Another Cozy Corner for OS Diversity From the BSD Cafe to illumos Cafe The idea for this new project was born from the success of the BSD Cafe, an initiative I introduced to the world in July 2023, which received an incredibly positive response. Far more than I ever anticipated. The BSD community already had its well-established hubs: in the Fediverse, places like bsd

With the primary backup strategies and methodologies introduced , we've reached the point where we can get specific: the Backup Server configuration. When choosing the type of backup server to use, I tend to favor specific setups: either I trust a professional backup service provider (like Colin Percival's Tarsnap ), or I want full control over the disks where the backups will be hosted. In both c

New Article Published I'm excited to announce that I have published a new, in-depth article on the BSD Cafe Journal : " WordPress on FreeBSD with BastilleBSD: A Secure Alternative to Linux/Docker ". This piece explores how to create a robust and secure WordPress installation on FreeBSD using BastilleBSD, leveraging the power and isolation of FreeBSD jails as a compelling alternative to the more co

Backup: Beyond the Simple Copy For as long as I can remember, backup is something that has been underestimated by far too many people. Between flawed techniques, "Schrödinger's backups" (i.e., never tested, thus both valid and invalid at the same time), and conceptual errors about what they are and how they work (RAID is not a backup!), too much data has been lost due to deficiencies in this area.

FreeBSD is an extremely powerful operating system. The ability to isolate services in jails and, thanks to ZFS, the simplicity with which you can create snapshots (both local and remote) make it a perfect system for increasing peace of mind, especially when running many workloads. Many providers, blinded by the success and large numbers achieved by Linux distributions, have decided to no longer su