Articles

The fourth in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. This one picks up where the boot article stopped, at the moment init runs /etc/rc. It covers how rc finds and orders scripts with rcorder, how rc.conf and its layers are really just shell, what rc.subr gives you for free, how to drive it all with service and sysrc (including inside jails), how to write a correct rc.d script for your own daemon using daemon(8) supervision, and the pidfile trap that makes “service stop” restart your process instead of stopping it. Then an honest audit of the rc.d scripts running my own Mastodon, Zigbee2MQTT and NetBox jails. Plus service jails, debugging, and an honest comparison with systemd units.

An open-weight Qwen 3.8 27B model, an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell rented by the hour, and one shell command to start it. For most of my everyday coding it is good enough, it answers at roughly 150 tokens per second, and my prompts stay on infrastructure I chose. Some honest caveats about what “self-hosted” means on someone else’s GPU are included, along with the workflow that has worked best for me: a frontier model for architecture, and a fast open-weight model for the token-heavy implementation loop.

For almost a year, my jailexec connection plugin let a compromised FreeBSD jail redirect a root-owned write onto the jail host. The input validation was fine. The problem was on which side of the jail boundary the paths were resolved. This is the story of the bug, the fix in 2.0.0, and the CVE that came with it.

RHEL 10 on ARM64, a Proxmox Backup Server, and no convenient native client package. I borrowed the client from an old server container, mounted the host root filesystem read-only, and gave SELinux a very specific explanation. Five minutes later, I had an encrypted, incremental backup. There are caveats.

I built an Arch Linux execution environment, taught pacman to answer to microdnf, and let Ansible Automation Platform use it to patch RHEL systems. The job succeeded. This is evidence, not a recommendation.

Modern programming languages are full of violence, vulgar abbreviations, and naked imperatives. Bespoke is a statically typed alternative in which exceptions are regrettable circumstances, mutexes grant private audiences, and every request to the compiler ends with a proper thank-you.

Citrix Workspace is an application I need but do not want woven into my workstation. I put its official Debian package in a disposable rootless Podman container, then pass through just enough X11, PipeWire, GPU, and webcam plumbing to open downloaded ICA files from Fedora’s file manager.

At 10:15 this morning I added a gently condescending toast for IPv4-only visitors to hofstede.it. It called ipify, which felt increasingly inappropriate for somebody operating an ASN. Three hours later I had written a Rust IP-information service, put it behind Caddy, given it three DNS names, and deployed it in its own dual-stack FreeBSD VNET jail. This is how a two-line dependency became infrastructure.

A jail shares the host kernel, so sooner or later you need a real virtual machine. bhyve has been able to run inside a jail since FreeBSD 12.0, and almost nobody does it. This is the full build from my production hypervisor: the devfs ruleset, the four things that have to line up, the two-tier bridge topology, and an honest account of what allow.vmm does and does not buy you.

For a few months now I have been building a terminal roguelike in Rust in the spirit of ADOM and NetHack. This article is about the technical groundwork: why ratatui and legion instead of a game engine, how the four map generators work (rooms, cellular-automata caverns, hand-drawn prefabs, and a hybrid of the last two), how field of view and A* pathfinding hook into my own map type through two traits, how content lives in RON files instead of code, and how save games avoid serialising the ECS at all.