#freebsd Articles

A Git repository is a good place for configuration files, but it does not know where they belong, which permissions they need, or why a work laptop and a home server should differ. Chezmoi adds that missing layer. This is how I use both tools to manage fish, Git, Neovim, GnuPG, OpenSSH and Atuin, including the recovery command for the inevitable day I edit a live file directly.

A bug report against my jailexec connection plugin needed a real FreeBSD jail to reproduce. An idle free-tier VPS with 512 MB of RAM turned out to be plenty: pkgbase provides a 33 MB base userland, persistent jails need no idle processes, and three Python-equipped test targets added only 1.1 GB of disk use. This is the build, including the two sharp edges that cost me twenty minutes.

Part 5 of the AS201379 journey: joining EVIX, an internet exchange that hands out VXLAN tunnels instead of switch ports, carrying a routed IPv4 /29 across the IPv6 overlay with PF policy routing, the dual-FIB routing that makes a VPS work as both a normal host and a routed AS site, moving the downstream MikroTik onto WireGuard, and a long-overdue cleanup of four routers’ worth of accumulated configuration.

Being ill for a week taught me that a large Jellyfin library is not entertainment, it is homework. ErsatzTV turns a media library back into linear television with real channels and schedules, but it only ships for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It is a .NET application driving ffmpeg, so I built it in a FreeBSD Bastille jail instead. One missing conditional was all that stood between FreeBSD and Intel VAAPI hardware acceleration.

My Home Assistant OS installation runs as a bhyve VM on a FreeBSD home server, while Zigbee2MQTT and Mosquitto live in a VNET jail with direct access to a ConBee II USB adapter. Homematic comes through a CCU3, and three recent IKEA Matter-over-Thread devices use the Nanoleaf Shapes controller I already owned as their border router.

A small, database-free DokuWiki deployment in a FreeBSD 15.1 Bastille jail, with nginx and PHP-FPM inside the jail and Caddy handling TLS and access policy at the edge.

Patching FreeBSD machines inside the DN42 overlay network without giving them clearnet access - a dual-homed VM that lazily caches pkg.freebsd.org, update.freebsd.org, and release tarballs from ftp.freebsd.org with nginx proxy_store, follows CDN redirects server-side, and serves everything over IPv6 into the mesh. Now also available as a public DN42 service at bsdmirror.chofstede.dn42.

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE is here, and the official upgrade instructions depend on whether your system uses distribution sets or packaged base. This guide walks through both supported paths, covers the boot-loader update, and explains the configuration merging process - all based on the official 15.1 upgrading documentation.

The third in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. This one covers how FreeBSD actually boots: the stages from power-on to login, BIOS vs UEFI, the loader and loader.conf, the difference between read-only tunables and runtime sysctls, the modern way to load kernel modules with kld_list, managing it all safely with sysrc, a practical security-hardening baseline, and - the headline act - boot environments with bectl, the undo button that turns a broken upgrade into a thirty-second reboot.

How I watch burningboard.net, my multi-jail FreeBSD Mastodon instance, from a separate observer host. A pull-based Prometheus stack reaching exporters across my own AS201379 backbone (locked down at the perimeter firewall, not by binding to unroutable addresses), Loki and Promtail for nginx logs, a textfile collector that fills the gaps FreeBSD exporters leave (ZFS, S3, pkg audit, Mastodon API stats), one Grafana dashboard that tells me at a glance whether the instance is healthy, and an Alertmanager ruleset that emails me before users notice.