A practical look at SmartOS, illumos, zones, LX compatibility and the way this operating system approaches servers. Not a complete guide, just enough to understand why I like it.

Three episodes, one week. AI bots that hallucinate VPN requirements, recommend Apache configs on nginx servers, and suggest replacing 128 GB of RAM with a cloud VPS. A field note on the cost of mistaking confidence for competence.

A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.

A guide on how to set up Time Machine inside a FreeBSD jail.

A practical guide to installing Void Linux on a ZFS root with LUKS-encrypted swap and working hibernation support.

I usually publish articles about how much I love the BSDs or illumos distributions, but today I want to talk about Linux (or, better, GNU/Linux) and why, despite everything, it still holds a place in my heart.

A practical guide to boosting Mastodon performance by self-hosting your media with SeaweedFS. Configure a fast, S3-compatible storage backend to efficiently handle your instance's files and take full control of your data.

A real-world horror story about contracts, control, and the dark side of managed open source.

Which virtualization host performs better? I put FreeBSD and SmartOS in a head-to-head showdown. The performance of Jails, Zones, and bhyve VMs surprised me, forcing a second round of tests on different hardware to find the real winner.

Introducing illumos Cafe: a community-run hub on illumos, inspired by BSD Cafe. Fediverse-ready (Mastodon, snac). Built for OS diversity, transparency, and positivity.

A new article on running WordPress on FreeBSD with BastilleBSD has been published on the BSD Cafe Journal, plus a small update on future technical content.

When a datacenter fire threatened 142 of my servers, my backup strategy had them back online in hours. This post shares my personal philosophy on creating a resilient system, focusing on the crucial planning that must happen before you write a single script.

A practical guide to installing FreeBSD on hosting providers that don't officially support it, using the powerful mfsBSD tool for rescue mode installations.

What happens when developers stop understanding code and just trust the 'vibe'? A real case of vulnerability hidden behind 'perfect' AI code and the implications for programming's future.

A GlusterFS failure during a critical client upgrade turned into a nightmare of false accusations and politics, revealing a deeper story of corruption.

A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.

Create a personal blog with NetBSD on a 1€ VPS - efficient, secure, and completely under your control. Minimal cost, maximum performance. Because your thoughts don't need to float in someone else's cloud.

Announcing the public release of BSSG, a Bash Static Site Generator born from a personal journey away from complex dynamic CMS. Discover a simple, portable alternative for your blog.

The slides, the notes, and the text behind my presentation at OSDay 2025 in Florence, Italy - 'Why Choose to Use the BSDs in 2025.

Using nginx to cache proxied media in snac to improve performance and privacy

Using nginx to cache snac multimedia files to boost performance

A tale of bad logging practices, overengineering, and a near-death experience.

Watchdog devices are important to be sure our servers are working. Unfortunately, watchdog daemon seem to crash if enabled on Rasbperry PI. The problem is that our Pis have a strange watchdog hardware device and needs to be petted quite often. Because of this, running the watchdog daemon without some special flags won’t work as standard FreeBSD petting time is too high. All you need to do is enable watchdog and add a flags line with some specfic options. Open the /etc/rc.conf file with your favourite editor and add:

Sometimes you want (or need) to assign a public OVH failover IP address to a FreeBSD jail but there’s not much documentation on how to do it inside a jail.

Monitor your services efficiently by installing Uptime-Kuma in a FreeBSD Jail.

This blog was born in 2018 as an extension of my “knowledge base”, a private wiki that I had been using for over 10 years. Over time, I realized it would be useful to keep track not only of configurations and specific details, but also of procedures and some notes on the approaches used to solve specific problems I encounter. I then thought that sharing these notes could be useful to others, as well as to myself, since comments from others would help me continuously improve my approach and techniques. And so it was.