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

Some random photos from OSDay 2025. I gave a talk about the BSD family and why to use them in 2025.

2/X

#OSDay #OSDay25 #OSDay2025 #Conference #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #OpenSource #OSS

Good evening, #BSDCafe!
Good evening, #Fediverse!

Today I was finally able to spend the whole day working on FreeBSD and OpenBSD servers, after a few days full of other activities.
I must confess - it’s been incredibly relaxing and refreshing.

I upgraded an OpenBSD server with a colleague (inside a bhyve VM - we were both connected to the same tmux session).
He was amazed by how simple the process was, and actually said “WOW” when the server sent the entire upgrade output via email.

Tomorrow, he’s planning to install a new OpenBSD server and “play around” with it.
Mission accomplished. 🙂

#RunBSD #OpenBSD #bhyve

I've used Wasabi Cloud for years for some external backups. Just a few things, and at times I went down to zero because I had no data. No billing. Recently, I emptied everything again and waited the required days so the data would no longer be counted. I haven’t had anything there for months, yet I just received another $6.99 bill.

I contacted them and asked why, since I’ve had zero data for months.
The official response: even if you have zero data, you still pay the minimum charge because it’s like a pay-as-you-go plan - you pay even if you don’t make any calls.

Tomorrow morning I’m deleting the account. This doesn’t seem like a fair business practice.
Let’s go back to using our own drives, for crying out loud! Own Your Data!

#OwnYourData #CloudComputing #Cloud

@feld @Natanox I've never used it in raid5/6 mode. But sometimes I started with two drives, then decided to perform a three-way mirror, then go back to single, stripe, etc.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed doesn’t enable automatic snapshots in the home directories by default. I enabled them myself and noticed that, from time to time, the computer would completely freeze.
After some research, I discovered that Btrfs has this issue when quotas are enabled. I disabled quotas and the problem went away - although now the system probably doesn't know how much space each snapshot takes.

FreeBSD on my (old) desktop and ZFS - any snapshots I want, on much older (2018) and more limited hardware - and I’ve never seen anything like that happen.

#FreeBSD #RunBSD #Linux #openSUSE

@Natanox I think the reason is the licensing "problem". Also, it "seems" more versatile - you can mix disk types, change RAID levels, etc. But in my eyes, it never became truly stable. I use it when needed, but I'm cautious 🙂

Server arrived today, immediately found a problematic drive 😔

TOSHIBA 12TB enterprise drive
Only 131 hours of use (basically new)
578 ATA errors (should be near zero)
Performance: 37 MB/s (should be ~200 MB/s)
5x slower than the other identical drives

ZFS isn't complaining, but I can't trust this drive.

#ZFS #DataRecovery #ServerLife #TechFail

@Jerry @rimu Good, old, portable python!
I've been looking at it for some time now, and looks like a good candidate for the BSD Cafe 🙂

Pizza.
What else?

#Food #Pizza #Italy #Italia

Nice post:
A Geographically Distributed Retro LAN with pfSense and FreshTomato

https://blog.pipetogrep.org/2025/05/08/a-geographically-distributed-retro-lan-with-pfsense-and-freshtomato/

#pfSense #FreeBSD

@winterschon Great article. Personally, I have lost data (not important or backed up) only with two file systems, namely XFS (about 20 years ago) and BTRFS (more recently). Even ext4 has caused me some issues, but it didn't lose data. In my eyes, ZFS has always been on another level. It's like when hardware is defined as Enterprise grade: it has significantly higher reliability, sometimes at the cost of a few trade-offs.

When ZFS was introduced in FreeBSD, I had mixed feelings: on one hand, I saw it as a "betrayal" of the Unix philosophy, something foreign within the base system. On the other hand, I was happy to see ZFS on FreeBSD and be able to use it natively. Today, that feeling of doubt has disappeared.

Fun Fact: At the end of 2008 / beginning of 2009, I bought a mini laptop — an Acer Aspire One, on sale because no one wanted them. Windows didn’t run on it for even a minute, but every other OS did. Including a version of "Hackintosh", which actually led me to get a MacBook Pro a few months later (which my parents are still using). It ran quite well.

But the OS that worked best and longest on that little guy was PC-BSD. I truly did everything with it. When I was flying around Europe during the most hectic years of my life, it was my trusty companion - always ready, always in my backpack. I have a special memory tied to it that will always make it dear to me, but it’s a private one 😃

Oh, I almost forgot the Fun Fact: its hostname was always "acerone" - from Acer (Aspire) One, of course. But in Italian, "acerone" sounds like "big Acer", and considering its micro size (9 inches), it was truly ironic.

#Memories #PC #FreeBSD #PCBSD #Acer #NetBook

@nyanide yes, I'll investigate. I'll try the 14.3-BETA and 15-CURRENT

Some N150 tests:
#FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE installs and runs. Wifi is detected (not tested, yet) but X doesn't seem to start. Will investigate.
#OpenBSD 7.7 installs and runs, X runs. I'm trying with IceWM and it's ok. I'm trying to install KDE Plasma. Wifi doesn't seem to be detected.

Lately, I’ve realized I hardly use my desktop anymore. After a while, it just started to strain my eyes - almost made me feel nauseous. I kept blaming the monitor or the fonts, thinking "yeah, I’ll tweak that soon".
Meanwhile, no problem at all on the laptop.

Then, just now, I had a sudden flash of insight. I took off the glasses I usually wear (don’t really need them, but I put them on at the computer to "rest" my eyes a bit).
Surprise: no discomfort. So it’s either my eyesight evolving with age... or the eye doctor went a bit too enthusiastic with the prescription last year.
Sadly, both are true 😄

Let me introduce you to aceBSD! Yesterday, while I was out grocery shopping, I saw a special offer on a final unit, and I had already been thinking for a while about getting a mid-range laptop to take with me to conferences, on trips, etc. Something small, practical, with an HDMI port, and capable of running at least one of the BSDs decently. After some careful thought, I decided to go for it today.

It's an Acer Swift Go 14 - with an Intel i5, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB NVMe SSD. What I really like is that it’s compact and has a high-definition OLED screen, a good keyboard, and for the rest... we’ll see. I just used Clonezilla to make a backup of the preinstalled Windows (I didn’t even boot into it...) and I’m now installing OpenBSD. I had to disable VMD (from a hidden BIOS menu) because otherwise the installer wouldn’t detect the NVMe. It also seems to detect the Wi-Fi, but I’m proceeding with a USB-C Ethernet adapter just to be safe.

I got it at a good price, so this could be the ideal solution. Fingers crossed, and… we’ll see!

I'll keep posting about this adventure, with the hashtag #aceBSD

#RunBSD #OpenBSD #aceBSD #NewLaptop

@jaalsa @nuintari I'd personally create some gpt labels and use those, so disks can move but will be recognised

@xenotar @justine those are bucatini all'amatriciana - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amatriciana_sauce

Today's pasta

@justine not a tiramisu, but still...

#Food #Pasta #Bucatini

A tracker for cheap VPSes through LowEndTalk: https://search.ponyhost.xyz/

Thank you, @deferred@ieji.de - it will be more than useful to me!

#VPS #OwnYourData #SelfHosting