Introducing illumos Cafe: a community-run hub on illumos, inspired by BSD Cafe. Fediverse-ready (Mastodon, snac). Built for OS diversity, transparency, and positivity.

Build a bulletproof backup server with FreeBSD, ZFS, and jails. Complete guide covering encryption, security hardening, and multiple backup strategies for enterprise-grade data protection.

A new article on running WordPress on FreeBSD with BastilleBSD has been published on the BSD Cafe Journal, plus a small update on future technical content.

When a datacenter fire threatened 142 of my servers, my backup strategy had them back online in hours. This post shares my personal philosophy on creating a resilient system, focusing on the crucial planning that must happen before you write a single script.

A practical guide to installing FreeBSD on hosting providers that don't officially support it, using the powerful mfsBSD tool for rescue mode installations.

What happens when developers stop understanding code and just trust the 'vibe'? A real case of vulnerability hidden behind 'perfect' AI code and the implications for programming's future.

A GlusterFS failure during a critical client upgrade turned into a nightmare of false accusations and politics, revealing a deeper story of corruption.

A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.

Create a personal blog with NetBSD on a 1€ VPS - efficient, secure, and completely under your control. Minimal cost, maximum performance. Because your thoughts don't need to float in someone else's cloud.

Announcing the public release of BSSG, a Bash Static Site Generator born from a personal journey away from complex dynamic CMS. Discover a simple, portable alternative for your blog.

The slides, the notes, and the text behind my presentation at OSDay 2025 in Florence, Italy - 'Why Choose to Use the BSDs in 2025.

How a simple idea turned into an international weather service on the Fediverse.

Using nginx to cache proxied media in snac to improve performance and privacy

Using nginx to cache snac multimedia files to boost performance

A tale of bad logging practices, overengineering, and a near-death experience.

A simple approach to prevent ZFS pools from getting stuck due to a lack of free space.

I share my experience migrating a client’s Windows BIOS VMs from Proxmox to FreeBSD/uefi, using bhyve and ZFS.

I share my experience migrating a client’s VMs from Proxmox to FreeBSD, using bhyve and ZFS.

A healthcare client risks IT failure by ignoring outdated infrastructure in favor of an impractical cloud migration plan.

Mastodon imposes a limit of 500 characters and 4 poll options. Here's how to change them.

Using a Permanent WebFinger Address for My Fediverse Profile - Make it easy to find your profile from any instance.

The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 - 'Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.

A comprehensive guide on how to move a FreeBSD installation, including the operating system, from one host to another, with a focus on ZFS and bootloader configurations (UEFI and BIOS).

After revisiting my old Fediverse instances and helping friends set up new ones, I took the chance to update and evaluate several platforms. Here's my experience with Akkoma, GoToSocial, Mitra, Snac2, and Mastodon.

Learn how to configure a reliable read-only root file system on NetBSD, improving system stability and reducing the risk of corruption in embedded and remote setups.

Learn how to build a self-hosted CDN using NetBSD, Varnish, and nginx

Learn how to build a self-hosted CDN using OpenBSD base and just 2 packages

Learn how to build a self-hosted CDN using FreeBSD jails, Nginx, Varnish, WireGuard, and PowerDNS to improve media delivery for your website without relying on external providers.

Learn to automate ZFS snapshots using zfs-autobackup for effortless system protection and easy file recovery.

Explore the evolution of the BSD Cafe network setup using FreeBSD, showcasing how to leverage advanced routing techniques for improved scalability and security.

Monitor your services efficiently by installing Uptime-Kuma on a FreeBSD Jail.

Discover how to create a secure and efficient network bridge between VPS instances using Wireguard and VXLAN on FreeBSD, allowing for flexible service distribution and improved resource management.

A simple method to limit the priority of processes within a FreeBSD jail using the nice(1) command.

Experience a journey from Kubernetes to FreeBSD, achieving major cost savings and efficiency through real-world optimization.

Discover how to enhance the stability of your FreeBSD system using ZFS pool checkpoints, providing robust backup and recovery solutions.

Learn how to block access from specific countries on your FreeBSD server using pf and ipdbtools to enhance security and manage traffic efficiently.

Comparative tests show FreeBSD’s virtualization performance surpasses Proxmox, especially with NVMe drivers.

FreeBSD provides tools for creating snapshots using both ZFS and UFS, essential for modern file system management.

FreeBSD has many hidden gems, including native support for booting in read-only mode.

Having a Linux remote desktop can be useful, and keeping it into a Alpine Linux VM can be both secure and efficient. Here’s how to do it.

Docker has been a fundamental part of my Linux setups for many years now. But it can be a sharp, double edged sword

Escape the cloud: Own your data with FreeBSD and be the owner of your data.

Escape the cloud: Own your email with FreeBSD and be the owner of your data.

I recently faced the task of moving an Alpine Linux-based VPS onto a FreeBSD host. I decided to use a jail.

Having a remote desktop can be useful, and keeping it into a FreeBSD jail can be both secure and efficient. Here’s how to do it.

Using VMs is a traditional and efficient way to separate servers but is it really needed when creating a FreeBSD VM on a FreeBSD host?

Stefano Marinelli My name is Stefano Marinelli. I was born in 1979 and graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Bologna in 2003. I founded and ran a small IT company focused on advanced services such as server management, virtualization, hosting, and custom-tailored solutions. Recently, I became the CEO of Prodottoinrete Group SRL, and DragasIT is now a part of this group. My main IT interests include FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, all the BSDs in general, Unix-like systems, embedded systems, high availability, and fault tolerance.

I believe it’s time to bid farewell to this venerable Linux server - 1690 days of uptime since last reboot

How I Managed to Save at Least 15% Battery Life Daily Thanks to NotiMail

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 FreeBSD VPS. Be the owner of your data.

In 2010, one morning, a client called. My task was to set up a new complex server within a tight two-day window. Given the constraints, I opted for my top choice at the time for such tasks: NetBSD and Xen. To my astonishment, over 10 years later, the server was still up and running perfectly

While following/followers numbers might not be of critical importance, especially in the fediverse, understanding the dynamics behind them can be intriguing. And that’s precisely what motivated the creation of the program we’re about to discuss.

In the recently created FreeBSD VPS, the network performance of vnet-enabled jails was significantly lower compared to that of traditional jails. Upon investigation, it appears that there is an issue related to Virtio drivers.

I’ve always kept an eye both on Android and iOS devices. I’ve been using an iPhone for the last 3+ years, and, one month ago, got a Google Pixel 7. Here’s what I found out.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

FreshRSS, an excellent and complete feed aggregator, is the first service we’ve been deployng and is already waiting for your registration.

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.

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.

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.

We started a complex, continuous and not always linear operation, that is to migrate, where possible, most of the servers from Linux to FreeBSD. Here’s why.

If you are using Proxmox, ZFS is one of the best local storage options. You can easily backup your lxc containers using Borg.

Sometimes you want (or need) to assign a public OVH failover IP address to a FreeBSD jail but there’s not much documentation on how to do it inside a jail.

Raspberry PI i4 s a great platform for FreeBSD but if u-boot detects there’s a powered hub, the boot seems to go crazy. It isn’t even able to recognize the SD partitions. The result is that the Rpi4 won’t boot and start loop.

Watchdog devices are important to be sure our servers are working. Unfortunately, watchdog daemon seem to crash if enabled on Rasbperry PI. The problem is that our Pis have a strange watchdog hardware device and needs to be petted quite often. Because of this, running the watchdog daemon without some special flags won’t work as standard FreeBSD petting time is too high. All you need to do is enable watchdog and add a flags line with some specfic options.

Alpine Linux and lxd are perfect together, especially if combined with a good file system. Let’s see how to install them on a btrfs file system.

Lxc containers are fast, small and useful. Proxmox Backup Server is quite slow with them, so here’s how to perform a fast and efficient backup using Borg.

docker-compose allows you to define a set of containers in a single file. They will be in their “namespace” and can be linked and tied together.

We can use docker both for static and dynamic websites. We have a wide choice of images - and we can even create our own.

What I’ll be describing now is another kind of setup, based on two containers, and it will help you to understand some of the features of Docker.

Docker has been a fundamental part of my setup for more than three years now. Day after day I tried to move as many services as possible to Docker and this was a very good move.

Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) has been released. It’s still in beta but is already perfectly usable. After many years, it’s now possible to perform incremental backups of the VMs and thanks to the qemu dirty bitmaps, backups are also fast.

Many people think that it is enough to ensure that the storage medium is redundant - and you are fine. WRONG!!!!!

I have already dealt with the problem of performing a correct backup. This time I will give you some insights into how I make backups and how I am able to guarantee a certain level of security.

Cephfs is great. It can be used to store and share files and can take advantage of the granularity and performance of Ceph. Big amounts of data can be stored and live snapshots can be taken so remote backups can be easily performed.

One of the interesting features of BTRFS is the dynamic snapshot generation, which grantees the possibility to have a perfect and immediate copy of a specific path.

Sometimes containers log a lot of things, and the logfile can become huge. This happens because containers aren’t supposed to run for a long time but to be created/disposed regularly. Here’s how to fix this. You have to instruct Docker, at launch, and tell how much you want the log file to grow before rotating and how many old logs you want to keep. For example, --log-opt max-size=50m --log-opt max-file=5

I’ve been using BTRFS for years and I’ve had few problems. Some of them are small and can be avoided with some smart improvements.

Sometimes servers can become unresponsive. Both physical and virtual, you may be unable to connect to them, especially when overloaded. So a watchdog can be a solution.

Hello everybody. This is the first of a series of tech posts. The idea behind this blog is to share some of the adventures I’ll be facing in the IT world.