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 se...
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 exampl...
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 fore...
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 sma...
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 ...
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 connect...
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 ...
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 t...
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. N...
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 men...
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 i...
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 ot...
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 de...
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 diffe...
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...
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...
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 o...
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 error...
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 wor...
It was one of those Friday afternoons when everyone just wanted to go home, but their PM had that look we all know too well. I manage the infrastructure for this mid-sized e-commerce client, so I get to see their development process from the server side. Their deadline was,...
