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Make your own VPN - Wireguard, ipv6 and ad-blocking included

Posted on April 3, 2023 | 10 minutes | 2053 words | Stefano Marinelli

VPNs are very useful both for management and personal use. Many people turn to commercial companies that provide them, but it is easy to install your own on a OpenBSD VPS. Be the owner of your data. [Read More]

Creating a Mikrotik CHR (RouterOS 7) bhyve VM in FreeBSD

Posted on March 21, 2023 | 3 minutes | 506 words | Stefano Marinelli

RouterOS 6 is running great on bhyve. Unfortunately, things change when dealing with RouterOS 7. It doesn’t boot at all. Here’s how to solve. [Read More]

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How we are migrating (many of) our servers from Linux to FreeBSD - Part 3 - Proxmox to FreeBSD

Posted on March 14, 2023 | 11 minutes | 2288 words | Stefano Marinelli

This is the story of a successful migration from Proxmox to FreeBSD. VMs, LXC containers and services are now running on the new server. [Read More]

Deploying a piece of the Fediverse

Posted on January 15, 2023 | 16 minutes | 3321 words | Stefano Marinelli

The Fediverse is composed by thousands of servers (instances). I’ve started to explore the different software solutions. Here’s what I’ve found out. [Read More]

How to force reboot a frozen Linux or FreeBSD machine

Posted on January 8, 2023 | 1 minutes | 198 words | Stefano Marinelli

Sometimes your filesystem gets stuck. No operations can be done and a “reboot” will just cause an indefinite waiting time for I/O. There’s a “magical” code that triggers a specific kernel condition - and a reboot. [Read More]

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Installing Mastodon inside a FreeBSD jail

Posted on November 23, 2022 | 4 minutes | 728 words | Stefano Marinelli

This time I decided to install Mastodon on a FreeBSD jail, managed by BastilleBSD. I’ll describe a simple, one jail installation, with the related rc files. [Read More]

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Creating an Alpine Linux VM on bhyve - with root on ZFS (optionally encrypted)

Posted on November 1, 2022 | 1 minutes | 212 words | Stefano Marinelli

bhyve on FreeBSD is great and Alpine Linux can be a great VM for docker or lxc/lxd container deployment, especially if using ZFS for rootfs. [Read More]

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FreeBSD, Caddy and PHP - a perfect match

Posted on July 18, 2022 | 2 minutes | 275 words | Stefano Marinelli

FreeBSD and Caddy play very well together for static websites/reverse proxies but we often need to serve dynamic websites. Adding PHP is quite easy. [Read More]

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How we are migrating (many of) our servers from Linux to FreeBSD - Part 2 - Backups and Disaster Recovery

Posted on May 30, 2022 | 6 minutes | 1247 words | Stefano Marinelli

Backup is not a tool. Backup is not a software you can buy. Backup is a strategy you need to study and implement to be able to solve your specific problems. [Read More]

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How we are migrating (many of) our servers from Linux to FreeBSD - Part 1 - System and jails setup

Posted on February 5, 2022 | 7 minutes | 1281 words | Stefano Marinelli

Many Linux users are asking how we’re migrating to FreeBSD, how jails can replace lxc or (in part) Docker, and how we’re monitoring and performing backups/restores. [Read More]

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