Category: Network

Creating a stretched Layer 2 network for VMs on bhyve and FreeBSD

(2025-09-04):
In today's globalized IT landscape the term "cloud" dominates conversations about infrastructure, applications, and deployment strategies. Public cloud providers promise scalability, flexibility, and resilience but yet many organizations still operate their own infrastructure for reasons of control, cost, and compliance... In these environments, FreeBSD continues to play an important role as a robust, secure, and versatile operating system. One of the powerful tools in the FreeBSD ecosystem is CBSD ( github ). CBSD acts as a management layer that simplifies the handling of FreeBSD jails, bhyve virtual machines, and other system resources. Instead of manually working through complex configuration steps, administrators can rely on CBSD’s unified command-line and TUI interfaces to create, configure, and maintain VMs and containers with ease. In particular, CBSD makes bhyve—the native FreeBSD hypervisor—far more accessible, allowing administrators to spin up virtual machines quickly and efficiently. While virtualization is an essential building block, networking remains equally .... [read more]

BoxyBSD Empowers the Open-Source Community by Provisioning 500+ Free BSD-Focused VPS Instances

(2024-12-07):
This weekend marks an incredible milestone for BoxyBSD : we’ve provisioned our 500th free VPS instance! What started as a passion project aimed at supporting the open-source community has grown into something truly special, and I couldn’t be more proud to see the impact it’s having on learners, enthusiasts, and open-source contributors worldwide. Building a Bridge to BSD and Beyond BoxyBSD was born out of a simple yet powerful idea: to lower the barriers to entry for anyone eager to learn, experiment, or contribute to BSD-based operating systems. By providing free virtual private servers (VPS), I’ve been able to offer a platform where beginners can explore the intricacies of system administration, networking, and security practices without the financial burden of hosting costs. This mission also extends to supporting open-source projects. Many community-driven initiatives lack the infrastructure needed to thrive. BoxyBSD fills that gap by providing free hosting on a range .... [read more]

Howto Use an External USB Network Dongle in XCP-ng for the Management Interface

(2024-07-27):
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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