Vincent's Blog

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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