Vincent's Blog

I'm looking for a simple way to connect my Android devices to my home via VPN. The goal is to have my GSM apps acting as if I'm home.

Specially interesting for services I want to use or check, but I don't want to provide them directly on internet.

For example my zigbee devices

My last evaluation on other BSD has decided my to use ZFS for my NAS.

My OpenBSD is working since +8 years very well, but I'm at 85% of his capacity, so I have to replace/upgrade his capacity.

Despite my OpenBSD NAS offers a pseudo-snaptshot system via rsync, this little machine becomes too small and too old to manage and provide files of several GB we have today. So, why not replace the software when we have to replace the hardware ;).

I have more and more big files to transfer between my end user devices (laptop, mobiles, ...). The goal of this blog is to compare cpdup and rsync to synch files between my OpenBSD laptop and my NAS.

Today, files I'm managing are bigger and bigger. For example, with modern camera I often have +500 photos to transfer which represent +6GB of data.

Moreover, I'm an heavy user of hardlinks, so I want to make sure all my hardlinks are correctly reproduced on the NAS.

This blog post will be a bit different than the others.

Indeed, days after days, but because my limited free time I should say weeks after weeks, this page will be completed based on progress I do with DragonflyBSD

My final goal is to better understand the usage of HammerFS.

I will explain what I did to learn HammerFS, which is Hammer2 at the time of this blog.

In a post of 2016 I explained how to build a Read-Only OpenBSD machine.

Because in the recent OpenBSD systems we have new components, this post will update the situation.

I remind that a read-only machine is a machine where most filesystems are read-only. As consequence you can cut power of the machine without damaging the filesystems.

Personally, I'm using such system for my firewalls and my hifi OpenBSD system.

On an old machine running and old BSD OS, I must trigger an email is some keywords are coming in a log file.

since this is a very old machine, installation of packages is no more possible.

This blog post will show a simple way I've did it with only shell script

I'm using a brand new laptop (T14s) with a wifi driver not supported by several BSD systems. So, the workaround is to install a VM host and run your preferred OS inside a VM

This blog post will show you how this impact performances

It's about 10 years now that I'm using FAPWS as WSGI server. Despite his very simple code base, it's remains the fastest I can test. This surprised me.

Since the upgrade to OpenBSD 7.5, when using ssh from an alacritty session, I receive the following message:

tset: unknown terminal type alacritty
Terminal type?

How to deal with that ?

For an OpenBSD user like me since +10 years, coming back to linux is quite strange and fun. The goal is to have multi-boot systems. This blog will document how I did it.

The clock of your OpenBSD machine is managed by NTPD. But in some cases this is not sufficient

For those using lot of terminal windows on your laptop, I've build a small script showing the battery's usage. His percentage, if it's charging or discharging. Color change to inform that battery is going bellow 20%.

Everythin without leaving your usual terminal window ;)

Since OpenBSD 7.3 the installation process allow you to encrypt your whole disk.

This is a nice security feature that most persons will activate on their laptop. Your CPU will increase effort to encrypt and decrypt all those files residing on your systems.

I don't know the real impact, but I estimate (via a simple and empiric measure) that full encryption could add an extra charge of 25% on my machine and thus on my battery.

This blog is for persons having an old and/or weak battery laptops running OpenBSD.

I'm a big fan of Openbox and I use it since +10 years now. It's simple to use, has a low foot print. But it has tons of features

In this blog, I'm sharing a simple configuration aspect which facilitate my day to day.

I do not want to convince you between tiling window manager or standard window manager, but you will see that Openbox offers lot of features without touching a mouse.

After several years of doing upgrades, I discovered lot of unused files on my different system's folders: /usr/X11R6, /usr/lib, ...

What is really nice with OpenBSD is that "system" is totally separated from the user space.

In this blog I will present my method to clean up the "system" part, including firmware.