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The Fediverse is an interconnected world of diverse platforms, brought together by the ActivityPub protocol. At its heart lies a fundamental concept: decentralized, federated communication. In this environment, relays play a significant role by enhancing the reach and visibility of servers (instances) within the network. To understand why relays matter, it’s important to explore how a relay works and what they bring to the Fediverse – including all the software components like Mastodon, Pleroma, snac and many more. ActivityPub Relay for the Fediverse by gyptazy An ActivityPub relay acts as a middleman, bridging multiple servers to facilitate broader content sharing. Without a relay, communication across instances relies entirely on direct relationships between servers. If two servers don’t know about each other, their users might remain unaware of the conversations and communities happening elsewhere. This might also often lead into missing content when searching for specific keywords or hashtags. A relay .... [read more]
As part of my BoxyBSD project, which is designed to operate on IPv6 only network connectivity, I recently implemented and provided DNS64 and NAT64 gateway support to bridge the gap between IPv6 and the legacy IPv4 world. This solution ensures that users can easily access important resources, like GitHub, which – even in 2025 – remains accessible only over the IPv4 protocol. The DNS64 component translates IPv4 DNS responses into IPv6 compatible records, while NAT64 handles the actual network translation, enabling smooth communication between IPv6 only devices and IPv4 services. Together, these technologies allow BoxyBSD VPS users to interact with the IPv4 internet without needing dual-stack configurations or other workarounds, such like having a dedicated NAT interface IP assigned. This approach makes life simpler for users and aligns with the project’s vision of delivering a streamlined, future-ready environment. By providing this functionality, I aim to reduce friction in the transition .... [read more]
The year 2024 marked a turning point for the virtualization industry. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, significant changes to VMware’s licensing model and pricing structure set off a wave of responses across the market. These changes had a profound impact on the virtualization landscape, altering long-held assumptions and forcing enterprises to re-evaluate their strategies. VMware had long been a leader in the virtualization space, with its solutions forming the backbone of countless enterprise data centers. Its platforms, including vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, were considered industry standards, praised for their robustness and feature set. However, post-acquisition, VMware’s licensing and pricing underwent substantial revisions. For many organizations, these changes represented a significant cost increase, leading to concerns about the sustainability of continuing with VMware’s solutions. The updates, while intended to align with Broadcom’s broader enterprise strategy, prompted businesses to reexamine their dependence on proprietary virtualization platforms. This shift created ripple effects, opening .... [read more]
This weekend marks an incredible milestone for BoxyBSD : the provisioning of our 500th free VPS instance . What started as a small passion project to support the open-source community has grown into a global platform helping learners, enthusiasts, and open-source contributors gain real-world experience with BSD systems. Building a Bridge to BSD and Beyond BoxyBSD was founded with a clear mission: to lower the barrier of entry to BSD-based operating systems . By offering free virtual private servers (VPS), BoxyBSD enables anyone to learn, experiment, and contribute without worrying about hosting costs or vendor lock-in. Users can deploy and explore a wide range of operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD , as well as niche platforms such as DragonFly BSD, MidnightBSD , and even Illumos for the (Open)Solaris community. This diversity makes BoxyBSD a unique learning and testing environment for BSD and UNIX-like systems. Empowering Learners and Open-Source .... [read more]
The bhyve hypervisor on FreeBSD is an impressive tool that brings lightweight, efficient virtualization capabilities directly into the FreeBSD ecosystem. It’s a powerful type 2 hypervisor that allows FreeBSD users to run virtual machines with minimal overhead, making it an excellent choice for those who value performance and stability. I find bhyve especially compelling for running various Unix-like operating systems like FreeBSD itself, Linux, and even Windows, thanks to UEFI support. In the past, I already wrote many blog posts about virtualization and hypervisor solutions where I also often mentioned bhyve but also the lacks around bhyve. However, bhyve is still an amazing way to virtualize your workloads by running VMs of any operating system. Recently I got ask how I usually manage bhyve and if I could provide a small howto. To manage bhyve VMs more easily, I rely on vm-bhyve, which streamlines the creation, configuration, and operation of .... [read more]
When I think about bhyve Live Migration, it’s something I encounter almost daily in my consulting calls. VMware’s struggles with Broadcom’s licensing issues have been a frequent topic, even as we approach the end of 2024. It’s surprising that many customers still feel uncertain about how to navigate this mess. While VMware has been a mainstay in enterprise environments for years, these ongoing issues make customers nervous. And they should be – it’s hard to rely on something when even the licensing situation feels volatile. Now, as much as I’m a die-hard FreeBSD fan, I have to admit that FreeBSD still falls short when it comes to virtualization – at least from an enterprise perspective. In these environments, it’s not just about running a VM; it’s about having the flexibility and capabilities to manage workloads without interruption. Years ago, open-source solutions like KVM (e.g., Proxmox) and Xen (e.g., XCP-ng) introduced .... [read more]
In one of my recent blog posts, I shared my journey as a long-time FreeBSD user. I talked about how I’ve been incredibly happy with the system, appreciating its rock-solid stability, flexibility, and performance. But, like every OS, FreeBSD had its gaps, especially when it came to some modern developments – one of which has been a pain point for many of us working with containerized environments: native support for Docker and Podman Linux images. Until recently, this missing functionality made working with containerized applications a bit of a challenge. Let me explain why that’s changed and how FreeBSD 14 has finally caught up to the container party. The Old Way: bhyve Linux VMs For a long time, one of the workarounds for running Linux containers on FreeBSD was to spin up a Linux VM using bhyve, FreeBSD’s native hypervisor. While bhyve is fantastic in its own right (fast, lightweight, .... [read more]
For nearly 15 years, FreeBSD has been at the core of my personal infrastructure, and my passion for it has only grown over time. As a die-hard fan, I’ve stuck with BSD-based systems because they continue to deliver exactly what I need—storage, networking, and security—without missing a beat. The features I initially fell in love with, like ZFS, jails, and pf, are still rock-solid and irreplaceable. There’s no need to overhaul them, and in many ways, that reliability is what keeps me hooked. My scripts from 20 years ago still work, and that’s a rare kind of stability that few platforms can boast. It’s not just me, either—big names like Netflix, Microsoft, and NetApp, alongside companies like Tailscale and AMD, continue to support FreeBSD, further reinforcing my belief in its strength and longevity (you can find the donators and sponsors right here). Yet, while this familiarity is comforting, it’s becoming .... [read more]
In today’s fast-paced IT environments, automation is essential for maintaining efficiency and staying competitive. Whether you’re managing a small-scale infrastructure or an enterprise-level system, the ability to deploy virtual machines (VMs) quickly, consistently, and with minimal manual intervention can be transformative. This is where tools like ProxLB and Terraform come into play, offering a powerful solution for automating the deployment and management of VMs. Why Terraform and not Ansible? I’m aware that Ansible is a great tool – also for such things – but Ansible might be slow in some cases with too many tasks and not writing own custom modules that improve the overall handling. Terraform is often the better choice when it comes just to build up a base infrastructure from scratch where Ansible can take over after this baseline has been set. So, let’s have a look at the other tools used here. ProxLB ProxLB is a .... [read more]
When you connect an external USB network (Ethernet) dongle to a node running XCP-ng, you might encounter an issue where the device appears as a "side-NUMBER-eth0" interface. This interface, however, is not connected and cannot be used for any management interfaces within XCP-ng. You may still be able to manually configure it and to assign IP addresses but it will be still refused to be used for the management interface. To resolve this, you need to rename the device appropriately. Unfortunately, simply renaming the interface won’t work; you need to define a udev rule to ensure proper configuration. Here’s a detailed guide on how to correctly set up your USB network dongle on XCP-ng - keep in mind, that you mostly only want to use this kind of network for your dev labs and not for production usage! First, you need to identify the external USB network dongle interface and .... [read more]
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