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Vincent's Blog

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work (Aristote)

Let's investigate FreeBSD jail versus bhyve VM

Posted on 2025-02-09 11:52:00 by Vincent in FreeBSD

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

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Just my memory here is how I've configure OpenBSD and FreeBSD for a IPv6 Wifi

Posted on 2025-02-08 13:52:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD FreeBSD

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 ;)

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Which platform is the best to run FreeBSD VM ? Linux/KVM or FreeBSD/bhyve ?

Posted on 2025-02-02 18:14:00 by Vincent in FreeBSD VM

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

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Avoid duplicate emails sent by crontab

Posted on 2025-01-03 13:36:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD

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.

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How to track new lines in log files thanks to awk

Posted on 2024-12-15 11:36:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD

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.

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How to keep config files in sync within a cluster of machines

Posted on 2024-11-16 19:14:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD High Availability

When managing a cluster of OpenBSD machines, keeping configuration files synchronized between nodes is essential for maintaining high availability and consistency. One effective approach for automating this process is to use entr, a simple and powerful utility for executing arbitrary commands when files change.

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High availability on OpenBSD with carp

Posted on 2024-11-15 21:42:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD High Availability

In this blog, I explain how to setup high availability services between 2 different machines thanks to carp.

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A simple cron for Laptops

Posted on 2024-11-06 22:32:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD vdcron

I was frustrated that recurrent jobs are not running like I want via the cron on my laptops. I was looking for something which trigger actions every hours the machine is running, or once every day, or once every week. For a daily task, it doesn't matter if we are the morning or the evening. For a weekly task doesn't matter if we are saturday, sunday or monday.

So I wrote a quite simple shell script dealing with this job, I've called it "vdcron"

Note of 2024/11/10: This post has few days, and I receive questions about "why not anacron?". So, I've just completed this post with this aspect.

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My sysupgrade adapted for OpenBSD 7.6

Posted on 2024-11-01 20:29:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD My Sysupgrade

For several years, I've been using a customized version of sysupgrade to avoid deploying all OpenBSD sets across my different machines. This adapted script has been working flawlessly, but in this post, I’ll share an updated version that incorporates the latest features and code improvements from the OpenBSD developers.

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Sending cron emails from any OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines

Posted on 2024-10-31 11:14:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD FreeBSD

With FreeBSD, the base system includes dma, the DragonFly Mail Agent. Developed by DragonFlyBSD developers, this SMTP client allows you to route outgoing mail through an established, trusted SMTP server.

This blog post will show how to redirect cron's email to a generic email address (agmail account in my case). And each server will have his own source email, so I can distinguish them easily.

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How to Resize a Partition in OpenBSD

Posted on 2024-10-26 12:42:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD

Resizing partitions in OpenBSD can be a bit intimidating, but it's a straightforward process if you follow the right steps. This guide will walk you through expanding the /home partition. We'll start with the initial state, then move on to unmounting, resizing, and checking the filesystem before finalizing the changes. All the code snippets provided here are ready to use.

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Remotely backup a machine with root without exposing the machine

Posted on 2024-10-14 22:06:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD FreeBSD

We would like to perform few rsync on a remote machine to backup some of his important files.

But we do not want PermitRootLogin.

In this blog we will see one of the alternative: forced-commands-only

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Special FreeBSD install for a NAS

Posted on 2024-10-06 19:41:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD Nas

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

My OpenBSD NAS server is working since +8 years very well, but I'm at 85% of his capacity.

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

In this post, I will not perform the standard install of FreeBSD. I will explain why I do that.

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Setup Wireguard as home VPN and connect it via Android

Posted on 2024-10-05 14:17:00 by Vincent in OpenBSD

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

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Special FreeBSD install for a NAS

Posted on 2024-09-29 17:12:00 by Vincent in FreeBSD Nas

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 ;).

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