Here is the CPU usage graph for the last 24 hours of the FediMeteo VM. A full 24 hours, during which a huge number of people are connecting, helped by the traction gained from being among the top stories on Hacker News and Lobsters, as well as the many shares across the Fediverse.

RAM usage? Active, around 450 MB. Then there is cache, ARC, and so on. But in practice, zero swap in use after days of uptime.

39 jails running, 39 snac instances, nginx serving the homepage, and HAProxy. HAProxy caching enabled. ZFS snapshots every 15 minutes, backups via zfs send and receive every hour. The same hourly schedule applies to the recalculation of cities, countries, and followers for the homepage.

All of this on a 4 euro per month FreeBSD VM.

If anyone has doubts about the quality and efficiency of FreeBSD, this is the data to show.

#FediMeteo #FreeBSD #RunBSD #IT #SysAdmin

Here is the CPU usage graph for the last 24 hours of the FediMeteo VM. A full 24 hours, during which a huge number of people are connecting, helped by the traction gained from being among the top stories on Hacker News and Lobsters, as well as the many shares across the Fediverse.

RAM usage? Active, around 450 MB. Then there is cache, ARC, and so on. But in practice, zero swap in use after days of uptime.

39 jails running, 39 snac instances, nginx serving the homepage, and HAProxy. HAProxy caching enabled. ZFS snapshots every 15 minutes, backups via zfs send and receive every hour. The same hourly schedule applies to the recalculation of cities, countries, and followers for the homepage.

All of this on a 4 euro per month FreeBSD VM.

If anyone has doubts about the quality and efficiency of FreeBSD, this is the data to show.

#FediMeteo #FreeBSD #RunBSD #IT #SysAdmin

I nearly forgot to wish those that celebrate a very happy OpenBSDmas too. 😉
#OpenBSD #RunBSD

I nearly forgot to wish those that celebrate a very happy OpenBSDmas too. 😉
#OpenBSD #RunBSD

I feel dirty 🪟 😂

I needed some Windows for a (German) tax related application, so just ran it in BHYVE. (Bit slow on the ThinkPad T480, but got the job done!)

#freebsd #bhyve #windows #windows11 #runbsd #unix

NYC*BUG Jan 2026: 2 meetings!

Social on the regular place & time: Jan 7th 2026

The BrassMonkey

And a BONUS video meeting with Peter @pitrh Hansteen: The Book of PF 4th edition, CRA, and a Q&A section. Jan 10th 2026. 13:00 local / 18:00 UTC

More info:
https://www.nycbug.org/

#runbsd

"Newbie" FreeBSD question... There's a couple of apps that I'm missing - not available using the "pkg install" command. I expect they may be already around somewhere in a dev repo or something (Gnome 48 apps).

- Apostrophe (markdown editor)
- Papers (PDF Viewer for Gnome 48)

Is there somewhere I should look for these apps? Not committed enough to try to compile gnome apps myself at this time. Ha.

I can adapt to different app (ofc!) but if there is a relatively painless way...

Sorry if I'm conflating 'Linux' logic with FreeBSD re: finding/adding external repos.

#RunBSD #FreeBSD #Gnome

Heading straight to the office now.
Tonight, I’ll be officially breaking in my Kobo with a fantastic book.
It’s a preview copy sent by someone I hold in the highest regard, and I can’t wait to dive into it.

In due time, I’ll let you know what it is and what I think about it! 😉

#RunBSD

This morning, as the zfs-send/receive had finished its job during the night, I performed the last sync and moved FediMeteo from the previous 4 euros/month VPS - netcup - to a 4 euros/month VPS - OVH, Milano, Italy.

Thanks to #BastilleBSD and the jail setup, it was easy peasy.

So, the weather forecasts are now broadcasted from Italy and the performance has skyrocketed - while still being served by a 4 euro/month VPS.

I suspect the netcup VM had been capped by the provider - but I'll investigate.

So...Ciao, FediMeteo!

https://fedimeteo.com

#FreeBSD #RunBSD #OwnYourData #VPS #FediMeteo

Ciao, FediMeteo!

In the past few days FediMeteo seemed to be having some performance trouble. I dug into it and only found minor issues, until I realised the VM itself had fallen off a cliff. After several reboots it became clear that both bandwidth and I/O latency had dropped to absurd levels. I suspect the provider slapped a cap on it.

So I took the chance to move everything to another VM and provider, still at 4 euro per month. And starting today, forecasts will be delivered straight from Italy. The performance jump feels like going from a storm to clear skies.

FediMeteo’s mission goes on. More countries are coming (stay tuned!) and we will keep aiming to serve everything from a 4 euro VM. I do have powerful hardware available, but proving that the project can run on tiny resources is still part of the mission.

#FediMeteo #FediMeteoAnnouncements #FediMeteoServices #VM #RunBSD #FreeBSD

OK So I'm interested to find out what all those cool folk running #OpenBSD at home as servers are using hardware wise. Don't worry there is nothing to be ashamed of here as I'm really excited and interested to hear from folk recycling equipment. What CPU, RAM do you have? Also do you have a separate boot and data disks ? How big are they and are they raid or not? How many services are you running on that hardware? #RunBSD

Goodbye Linux & Podman, hello FreeBSD & Jails!

Just migrated my blog (https://blog.hofstede.it) to a fully native BSD stack (where my Gemini Capsule was already living).

Stack (using Bastille VNET Jails):
- Caddy (Ingress, TLS, Reverse-Proxy)
- Nginx Jail (Internal. Static file serving)
- PF

The Cool Part: A Zero-Trust CI/CD pipeline.

My Forgejo runner deploys via restricted rrsync into an air-gapped "transporter" jail, which nullfs mounts the web root.

Security: Source-IP restricted, no interactive shells, no PTY.

The simplicity of files-on-disk beats container abstraction every time.

#BastilleBSD #SelfHosted #SysAdmin #IPv6 #ZFS #FreeBSD #RunBSD

I feel dirty 🪟 😂

I needed some Windows for a (German) tax related application, so just ran it in BHYVE. (Bit slow on the ThinkPad T480, but got the job done!)

#freebsd #bhyve #windows #windows11 #runbsd #unix

OK So I'm interested to find out what all those cool folk running #OpenBSD at home as servers are using hardware wise. Don't worry there is nothing to be ashamed of here as I'm really excited and interested to hear from folk recycling equipment. What CPU, RAM do you have? Also do you have a separate boot and data disks ? How big are they and are they raid or not? How many services are you running on that hardware? #RunBSD

@stefano

#RunBSD #FreeBSD #Linux #Linuxisms #IT #SysAdmin

That is not correct in Linux either

When you try to install a software on FreeBSD, using the official "install.sh" way but it tries to write binaries in /usr/bin instead of /usr/local/bin

#RunBSD #FreeBSD #Linux #Linuxisms #IT #SysAdmin

Goodbye Linux & Podman, hello FreeBSD & Jails!

Just migrated my blog (https://blog.hofstede.it) to a fully native BSD stack (where my Gemini Capsule was already living).

Stack (using Bastille VNET Jails):
- Caddy (Ingress, TLS, Reverse-Proxy)
- Nginx Jail (Internal. Static file serving)
- PF

The Cool Part: A Zero-Trust CI/CD pipeline.

My Forgejo runner deploys via restricted rrsync into an air-gapped "transporter" jail, which nullfs mounts the web root.

Security: Source-IP restricted, no interactive shells, no PTY.

The simplicity of files-on-disk beats container abstraction every time.

#BastilleBSD #SelfHosted #SysAdmin #IPv6 #ZFS #FreeBSD #RunBSD