Notices by Stefano Marinelli (stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe)

@ricardo some admins do it. For me, this could be difficult as some of the services are running on servers I'm already using for other purposes.

@jwildeboer Wise choice! Angelo Badalamenti created a great soundtrack, perfect for the atmosphere.

@1eye @jwildeboer I loved her voice in "The Nightingale"

That man was an artist.
I still remember the night I watched this episode of Twin Peaks, many years after its release.
I'm not easily impressed, but that evening I remember feeling unsettled for a very, very long time.

(sorry for the YouTube link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0YI_eHg3Aw

#DavidLynch #Lynch #Goodbye #TwinPeaks

@grunfink @ltning this is GREAT! And powered by #NetBSD

The latest issue of the FreeBSD Journal has just been published and contains an article written by me: My EuroBSDCon Experience in Dublin

https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based-edition/virtualization-2/

#FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #DragonFlyBSD #RunBSD #EuroBSDCon #EBC24

Client: Help, emergency. I have 24 hours to move my workload to another server. What do we do?
Me, five minutes later: "Done. Your workload is now running on the new server."
Client: "How did you move over 200GB with just a minute of downtime, from one provider to another and in a different country?"
Me: "Thanks to FreeBSD, ZFS, and a little bit of proactive planning."

I have a task that replicates all the VMs from one server to another every 15 minutes using zfs-send/zfs-receive. This VM connects to a VPN with two reverse proxies.
Meaning, when I move this VM, we don’t need to change any IPs since it’s not directly exposed.
I powered it off, cloned the differences in seconds, and restarted it.

Client in disbelief.
Me, relaxed and happy.

Thank you, FreeBSD, thank you, ZFS!

#FreeBSD #ZFS #TechSupport #ServerMigration #OpenZFS #SysAdmin #RunBSD

Hardware acceleration on OpenBSD 7.6 (VA-API)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRmgY-MFzfc

#OpenBSD #RunBSD

UPDATE: I haven't seen Recall in action there. I was just asking the doctor how they'll deal with it.

This morning, I went to the doctor for a scheduled appointment. While she was looking at the results of blood tests from two years ago on the screen (and suggested repeating them for a follow-up), I realized she was using Windows 11. A detail came to mind. The doctor is extremely polite and friendly, so I asked her, "How do you handle the feature called Recall?" The doctor was taken aback and had no idea what I was talking about. I was about to drop the conversation, but she, being a serious professional, immediately called the technicians who manage their PCs to ask for clarification. They downplayed it, saying it's not an issue and that it's a feature "on all PCs, so we can't do anything about it." She started to express that she didn’t like it and wanted it deactivated. No luck: they won’t proceed because, according to them, even deactivating it is "a hack that could compromise future updates." She’s furious and will talk to her colleagues and the decision-makers. She wants secure systems because "there’s patient data involved."

In reality, patient data is stored on servers (which I haven't investigated), but everything that appears on the screen is, in my opinion, at risk.

I’ve offered to help them find a solution—because, if I'm right, all they need is LibreOffice and a browser. In that case, I’ll suggest one of the *BSD or Linux systems and do it for free.

I don’t want to make money off my doctor. I just want patient data to be (sufficiently) secure.

#IT #Recall #Windows #OwnYourData #Security #Privacy #RunBSD #Linux

@gyptazy @grunfink thank you!

Some technical details for those interested:
The entire FediMeteo setup runs on a FreeBSD VM costing around 4 euros per month. It supports almost all major EU countries (plus the UK), with just a few left to complete. Currently, there are 25 separate jails, each running its own instance of snac, totaling 25 instances. The VM load typically stays around 10%, which increases to 30% when updates are published for countries with larger numbers of cities (currently Germany and Italy). The only time the load spikes is when new countries are announced; during that time, all remote instances connect to all cities to download their details.
As for RAM usage, excluding the ZFS cache, it's currently a total of 213 MB. Yes, MB.

#FreeBSD #FediMeteo #snac #Fediverse #Efficiency #RunBSD

Another great post by @joel : Cruising a VPS at OpenBSD Amsterdam

https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/cruising-a-vps-at-openbsd-amsterdam/

#OpenBSD #RunBSD

@grunfink this is a great release. Thank you!!!

What are you waiting for? Let's go!

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon #CatOfFediverse #CatsOfFediverse

@jwildeboer @Linkshaender @chbmeyer @nik thanks for the suggestion! yes, my plan is to contact them as this project is having an unexpected, positive success.
At the moment, I should be safely under their limits and I am crediting them in every post

@Linkshaender @chbmeyer @nik I've modified the text, so it's not saying "every German city" but "every supported German city". I'm doing this in my spare time with my money, using the free Open-Meteo APIs (limited, otherwise I'll have to pay). I'm trying to cover zones, not specific cities. I'm also adding cities when possible, just upon request.

@gashead76 @vsis Yes, snac is perfect for this purpose. The choice was quite straightforward. The load average is ridiculously low — all the instances, Nginx, etc., are using only 154 MB of RAM (including the FreeBSD kernel and tasks). snac is an amazing tool.

A customer uses software developed by a 45-year-old developer. It has been in production for over 10 years, the code is theirs, and the developer is paid to write and maintain it. In my opinion, this approach is correct, as it gives my client the freedom to use their own code. The program is written in C and works well, never having caused any particular issues, although, in my opinion, it’s quite heavy for what it actually needs to do.

Yesterday afternoon, I was at this client’s for an emergency (which I will describe later), and since I was there, we tried to run it on FreeBSD, but it didn’t work. The client asked me to take a look at the code, hoping I could figure out what was wrong. Despite not doing much development, I realized the issue was that the program was trying to access files on static Debian paths, and once fixed, everything worked fine.

However, I noticed a detail: at the start, it parses a configuration file (old-school, not json) to look for values set to "ON" and "OFF". The parsing happens on characters, but in the end, it doesn't matter much since it’s done only when the program launches. I noticed that a series of ints are defined, where ON is set to "1" and OFF to "0".

Out of curiosity (I imagine the developer might have labeled me as a troublemaker), I asked why they hadn’t used bools, and if a different numeric value was expected. He replied, irritated, that it didn’t make sense to use bools just to save "a few bytes". After taking a closer look at the code, I realized how it wasn’t remotely optimized, resulting in "monstrous" computational complexities compared to the simple operations needed. Of course, I said nothing, but clearly, the developer noticed my expression. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I’m very expressive. He started saying that hardware is advancing, the world is advancing, and that the "obsession" with optimization was pointless. I didn’t respond. The client wasn’t around, and I had no intention of sharing my thoughts on the code with him.

Back in the office, the client called and asked why the developer had complained that "I criticized the code," and what I thought about it. I simply replied that, in my opinion, and from what little I had seen, the code seemed fine; I had only asked questions about some implementation choices. Everything was fine, everything was resolved - the developer isn’t a bad person, just a little sensitive.

My takeaway here: the mini-PC I now have at home consumes half the power of the previous one, has extremely superior performance, and opens up new possibilities. What’s the point of creating better hardware if we "eat up" the advantage by filling the software with inefficiencies?

#Dev #IT #SysAdmin #Efficiency

@flopp @jwildeboer Yes, I’m aware of the issue. However, for maximum compatibility across all languages, I had to 'normalize' special characters. Unfortunately, this includes German umlauts, accented Italian letters, as well as accented characters in French and Spanish. This approach helps avoid encoding and compatibility issues across different platforms, but I do recognize that it may cause some inconvenience for users who are accustomed to the original character forms. Over time, I will correct everything in the names and bios of the accounts.

Announcing FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse!

Weather has always influenced our lives: from agriculture to outdoor activities, to extreme events that, thanks to modern technology, can now be predicted with greater reliability. Personally, weather plays a significant role in my daily decisions, which is why I decided to create a service tailored for the Fediverse.

FediMeteo uses Open-Meteo data to publish updates every 6 hours, including current weather conditions, forecasts for the next 12 hours, and predictions for the upcoming days. Each country is served by its own dedicated instance (e.g., it.fedimeteo.com for Italy), managed through snac to ensure simplicity and efficiency in publishing.

You can follow FediMeteo directly in the Fediverse (on Mastodon and compatible platforms), via RSS, or by visiting the dedicated page for your city (e.g., fr.fedimeteo.com/paris).

Currently supported countries include:
Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands – with many more regions coming soon!

FediMeteo is hosted on a FreeBSD-based VPS, with each country isolated in its own jail to ensure security and scalability.

Visit the main site to explore the national instances and start following your local weather updates today:
https://fedimeteo.com

Happy weather monitoring to all! 🌦️

#FediMeteo #Announcements #FreeBSD #FediMeteo #WeatherForecasts #Weather #Meteo #snac #Fediverse #Mastodon