After running a blog on an outdated Ubuntu 16.04 VPS for ten years, the author migrated it to a FreeBSD-based Hetzner server for improved security, cost efficiency, and performance. The new setup leverages FreeBSD Jails managed by Bastille for isolation, Caddy as a reverse proxy for automatic SSL handling, and ZFS for snapshots and data integrity. Benchmarking using hey and wrk from Vultr VPS instances across four continents showed the FreeBSD server handling up to 11x more requests per second with significantly lower latency compared to the old Ubuntu setup. The migration also reduced costs by over 50% while providing better hardware specs, including double the CPU and memory, though the author acknowledges that much of the performance gain likely stems from the new server's four CPU cores versus the old single-core setup.
A step-by-step guide to installing and configuring GitLab on FreeBSD 15.1 in a bhyve VM, covering PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx, and GitLab setup with commands and configuration details.
The NetBSD project has released the sixth release candidate for 11.0, asking users to test the nearly year-old netbsd-11 branch and report issues via mailing lists or PRs, with DVD-sized ISO images recommended for full-featured installs.
A recent academic paper measures the adoption of pledge and unveil in OpenBSD's base and packages and concludes that these sandboxing features facilitate secure coding practices rather than hinder them.
OpenSSH 10.4 adds experimental composite post-quantum signatures (ML-DSA 44 + Ed25519), fixes several security issues in sftp, scp, and sshd, and includes numerous bugfixes and portability improvements.
This week covers FreeBSD boot process fundamentals, running pkgbasify on FreeBSD 15.1, upgrading FreeBSD 15.0 to 15.1, a degraded ZFS pool analysis, FreeBSD on Framework systems, monitoring a FreeBSD Mastodon instance, GhostBSD's March 2026 finance report, and more.
After upgrading Homebox to 0.26.2 in a FreeBSD jail, the service fails to start due to a missing auth.apikeypepper; the fix is to generate a 48-byte base64 key with openssl, store it in /etc/rc.conf.d/homebox as HBOXAUTHAPIKEYPEPPER, and restart the service.
This episode covers FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE, OPNsense 26.1.9, a comparison of FreeBSD Jails vs LXC, and a guide to respectfully archiving a website, plus a look at corrupting a ZFS file on purpose.
The FreeBSD Foundation is accepting travel grant applications for EuroBSDCon 2026, open to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses, with a deadline of July 7, 2026.
A remote TLS peer can cause a kernel panic via uninitialized memory access in KTLS receive on all supported FreeBSD versions; patches and workarounds are available.
The Linuxulator in FreeBSD 14.3, 14.4, and 15.0 does not zero a stack-allocated Linux siginfo_t before copying kernel data into it, allowing unprivileged users to read 104 bytes of uninitialized kernel stack memory.
FreeBSD has issued a security advisory for multiple vulnerabilities in iconv(3) affecting HZ, UTF-7, VIQR, ZW, and ISO-2022 encoding modules, which can lead to buffer overflows when processing untrusted input, with patches available for all supported releases.
FreeBSD's compat32 kevent() handler can expose uninitialized kernel stack data to unprivileged users due to an unzeroed stack struct, affecting FreeBSD 14.3, 14.4, and 15.0; patches and rebuilds are available for stable and release branches.
The audit(4) facility incorrectly records successful outcomes for ptrace(PTSCREMOTE) system calls that actually failed, potentially misleading audit-based IDS; all supported FreeBSD versions are affected and patches are available.