Vincent's Blog

Tired of your WiFi vanishing mid call, leaving you staring at a spinning wheel of movie? I've been there—furious, fumbling for my phone's hotspot like it's 2015. But no more. I just wired up a sneaky 4G sidekick: the TP-Link MR600. It's like a ninja router—silent, speedy, and ready to swoop in when your ISP flakes out. One ping fails? Boom. Traffic flips to cellular backup in seconds. No drama, no downtime. All powered by some clever OpenBSD magic that makes it feel effortless.

FreeBSD’s securelevels provide a unique way to enforce system integrity directly at the kernel level. Unlike file permissions or ACLs, which root can override, securelevels place a ceiling on what even the most privileged account can do.

By carefully choosing between -1, 0, 1, or 2, administrators can strike a balance between flexibility and security. Development machines remain open and adaptable, while production systems become far more resistant to tampering—even if compromised by a superuser account.

Lightweight, fast, and endlessly customizable, that’s what pekwm offers for FreeBSD systems. But what really makes my setup useful for me is the easy integration of small scripts we can build around it. From session restore to dynamic menus, brightness control, and even a quirky lock screen, this desktop has grown into a personal environment that feels both minimal and complete.

It's a window manager, like many others, but with tons of shortcut keys which facilitate the day to day use.

At the end, the usage of the mouse is marginal, but really easy to use.

Since few months, I'm using zsh as my main shell. In this post I explain changes I did and why. It uses Antidote, smart plugins, and a clean prompt. For syntax highlighting to battery status in the prompt, every detail is tuned for my daily use. Here’s how my .zshrc makes Zsh enjoyable.

Neovim configurations are never set in stone; they’re always evolving. But there comes a moment when you feel you’ve maximized what your setup can do for you. Every component is installed, configured, and working seamlessly, making your daily Neovim experience smooth and efficient. That’s exactly where I am with this config. It perfectly suits my needs, and I haven’t felt the urge to tweak it for weeks—maybe even months. It feels like I’ve hit a sweet spot. How long will this last? I’m not sure. But I’m excited to share it in my upcoming posts.

There are tones of zsh config on internet, but none were matching my needs. Thus, I've decided to build mine and to share it with you. Feel free to copy / re-use part of it.

This is more for my own needs, but I propose in this post to describe all steps required to upgrade a FreeBSD hsot running version 14.2 to the last version 14.3. And to particularely see what must be done for the jails running on it.

VM running on such host are not in the scope of the post since a VM is totally independant of the host.

I would show how easy it is to install a docker app on a FreeBSD host. I've taken the choice of the Image viewer called Immich which is not available on BSD systems.

After installing GhostBSD a few months ago, I decided to investigate why, in some cases, my mouse mouvement acts like a drag/drop instead of a simple move. This is really annoying when you have to click on webbrowsers's tabs. Instead of moving the mouse, it moves the webbrowser's tab in another window.

After having played with bhyve VM and Jail container in my previous posts, I'm investigating here how to migrate them from one host to another.

Unfortunately FreeBSD does not have "live migration" yet. But here you will see that the downtime could be around 1 second. For many applications such down time is not noticeable

In my previous blog post I was discovering FreeBSD VM and their impact on performance.

In this blog I'll compare a FreeBSD VM with a FreeBSD Jail

How complex is it to build, what are the steps, ...

And do we have the expected performance from those Jails

Every year stand one of the biggest OpenSource conference, and this is close to my house. The subject of this blog is to explain how I've configured my OpenBSD 7.6 and FreeBSD 14.1 to connect to their wifi which only "speak" IPv6

This is not a setup I encountered frequently, and I just want to remember how I did it ;)

I would invest time and energy on the setup of VM, but on which platform ? Since +15 years, I like BSD systems, but I hear more and more persons promoting Linux/KVM platforms. Should I re-invest (I started with Linux before 2000) my time on Linux ecosystem ? Lot of elements must be taken into account to answer such question, but in this blog I'll focus on the performance aspects. More specifically, I'll compare Linux/KVM and FreeBSD/bhyve. And I'll use tests representative for me which are mainly compute and filesystem. The network part is also important, but the machine I will use for such study is not a good one for that.

Update February 9th 2025: I have added a comparison between virtio-blk and nvme

This is a very spimple idea which avoid that cron job sends too much emails.

This script store the hash of the email and, based on that, decide that this is relevant or not.

In this blog I'll share a one line command awk allowing me to see only new lines since previous check.

I'm heavily using this feature in my daily scripts: /etc/daily.local or /etc/weekly.local. This allows me to only see what has changed since previous days.

This is really useful for last command, for dmesg or for /var/logmessages.