Tom

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@pertho

Sysadmin, forced to use Linux/Mac OSX for work, prefers BSD, plant-based. Anti AI, Anti Fascist. Wobbly (IWW!), old school goth.

Posts automatically deleted after 2 months.
🇺🇸 living in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

🐡 🎷🌱🏴

#OpenBSD #FreeBSD #linux

I used to be @pertho@bsd.network

Website: https://pertho.net
Pronouns: he/him they/them
Profile Picture: Stylised white raven on a dark background. Borrowed from the Raven Flag (Nordic Animism)
Header Picture: Picture of a full solar eclipse over the earth

Public Key

npub1t8972gau7j9n4pnet424s8kj3hz0hh8f4wtecmw23s4w9m2vxa3q4f42h4

NIP-05 Address

pertho_at_mastodon.bsd.cafe@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9njl9yw70fze6seu4642crmfgm38mmn56h9uudh9gc2hza4xrwcsprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnts0dgxw

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1t8972gau7j9n4pnet424s8kj3hz0hh8f4wtecmw23s4w9m2vxa3q4f42h4

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Last Notes

2026-09-22 12:34:15 UTC

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I wish I could get my family off Signal and onto DeltaChat but what happens when they get a new phone?

2026-09-22 05:47:10 UTC

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Oh bloody hell. I'm supposed to pick up a new MacBook at work next week. Dreading it being on OS 27. Ugh.
Well at least some helpful soul posted a guide:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366

2026-09-20 06:56:05 UTC

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I blame PHP Frameworks! 😂

2026-09-19 21:11:54 UTC

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I'm guessing policy goes into /usr/local/etc/firefox on FreeBSD?
@npub1prm…rs6z

2026-09-19 11:20:53 UTC

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I think I'd rely more on snapshots and zfs send if more storage solutions supported it. I can't just always rent another VPS. Sometimes something like a Hetzner storage box with restic is better for my use case.

2026-09-19 10:27:14 UTC

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How does it compare with something like sanoid?

2026-09-16 07:54:49 UTC

Hey #FreeBSD folks: I'm running Prometheus in a jail, but I have jail_exporter running on the host. Am I better off getting jail_exporter to listen on, say, prometheus' jail IP so prometheus can just scrape its own IP for the metrics or is there another way? I'm not using VNET. (Actually can't use VNET in this case)
Please boost! Thanks so much!

2026-09-13 21:25:29 UTC

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Henning has the best t-shirts!

2026-09-12 12:41:30 UTC

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If you load up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvRMsLWcBdI and scroll to the 3 hour mark, you can watch @npub1ef5…gcpc 's talk.

2026-09-12 12:31:23 UTC

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You're most welcome! You've inspired me to take another look at my backups and see if I can make improvements. I know I already want to make sure all my @npub1k2x…ns8g templates are up to date so I can quickly recreate jails I need. I keep my datasets separate from the jails and make sure they can be replicated and backed up so that in th event something happens, I just restore the datasets and recreate the jails with the templates and it's as if nothing has changed!

2026-09-12 12:25:22 UTC

Just watched @npub1ef5…gcpc 's fantastic talk at EuroBSDCon (thank you whoever is doing the streaming because I couldn't attend!)
Disaster recovery is something not often thought about, or is fleeting. It's really important to have backups, have multiple places for them, and to test them regularly. There is nothing worse than finding out a backup you thought was fine, but wasn't fit for purpose.
The zfs send/recv is a great idea. Take a ZFS snapshot, and then a remote machine can just pull it down.
Of course if you don't have a spare machine at hand, you can just use a utility to back up to, say borgbase or a hetzner storage box or even to a spare hard drive you have. You can never have enough redundancy for this sort of thing.
Also many kudos to Stefano's wife for being so understanding and supportive. Disaster recovery is really emotionally and mentally draining!

2026-09-11 11:34:41 UTC

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I really hope we see the same commit guidelines from the FreeBSD and OpenBSD projects. They really need to release some kind of official statement on this one way or the other.

2026-09-10 16:36:04 UTC

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I still prefer SwearTrek over Effin' Birds though!

2026-09-09 22:59:09 UTC

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I miss Swear Trek! When did they stop making them?

2026-09-06 20:35:35 UTC

Everyone at #eurobsdcon have lots of fun! I wish I could go. Just not in the cards this year. Hopefully next year!

2026-09-03 12:16:04 UTC

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Grazie mille!

2026-09-03 08:35:06 UTC

Another revolution around our star. Somehow these seem to go faster every year.

2026-09-03 07:40:53 UTC

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There's something in ports but I've not tried it: https://www.freshports.org/www/go-away/

2026-09-02 07:19:37 UTC

Anyone running #FreeBSD and #unbound (DNS resolver) and finding unbound doesn't actually start after a reboot?
The init script has:
# PROVIDE: unbound
# REQUIRE: FILESYSTEMS defaultroute netwait resolv
# BEFORE: NETWORKING
# KEYWORD: shutdown
However, unbound needs to listen on an interface or IP. Why have the script run before networking and yet "require" defaultroute? This makes no sense.

2026-08-31 21:57:41 UTC

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Oh that's pretty cool! I really want to check that out when I get some more time.

2026-08-31 13:24:58 UTC

In #Mastodon is there a way to filter languages on the Home timeline? Sometimes people I follow post things in other languages that I don't know. I'm sure it's interesting but I can't read a word of it. The Preferences -> Other -> Filter Languages is only for "Public Timelines".
😞

2026-08-31 13:09:52 UTC

Hey #IPv6 folks: If I do NOT have a /64 assigned to me and only have a single IPv6 assigned, am I better off adding fd00::/7 addresses to the jails and then NAT'ing to them like I do with the IPv4 addresses?
I don't think I have any other kind of choice here.
#FreeBSD #networking

2026-08-31 10:21:08 UTC

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Could be credit card skimmers. Criminals with stolen credit card numbers testing them with small purchases over and over .

2026-08-29 22:58:08 UTC

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We live in the dumbest, fucking timeline. Can't wait for the bubble to pop.

2026-08-28 08:08:28 UTC

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Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" method was the early beta version of enshittification.

2026-08-25 13:44:19 UTC

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Company I work for just charges an arm and a leg for an "upgrade". (Drupal not Wordpress but same idea)
Of course, the AI bots find the weakest partof the site (the search) and smash it so "We need mooaaarrr powwwwaaarrrr!!!"

2026-08-24 13:01:05 UTC

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I just re-did the encrypted swap steps and now it works perfectly! Thanks so much for updating it! 👍

2026-08-22 11:14:12 UTC

I had been wanting to look into #wine gaming on #FreeBSD again. I had spotted a blog post: https://www.freebsdsoftware.org/blog/freebsd-gaming-2026.html
It seems inaccurate. For example, some of it suggests you install 'dxvk' with pkg install. Also references a "mesa-vulkan-intel" package.
Neither of those packages even exist!
Is https://www.freebsdsoftware.org some kind of AI slop factory of blog posts or something? The text looks very "AI" generated. Some truthful some utterly false.
*SIGH* This is the internet in 2026.
One good thing I noticed though: The latest wine-devel package: 11.5,1 does WOW64 support so no more of that pkg32.sh install --old nonsense to do.
Have yet to test anything but will do in the future.

2026-08-17 18:52:40 UTC

You have a dual-stack #FreeBSD server. You already have IPv4 working fine on it. The jails are the classic/original NAT type (not VNET, no bridges or any of that stuff)
You want to add IPv6 to the jails. Your hosting provider gives you a /64.
What kind of IPs do you use on the jails?

2026-08-17 11:03:47 UTC

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Have a great week!! 👍

2026-08-12 18:30:46 UTC

Here's my crappy blurry photo of the solar #eclipse2026
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/117/083/955/430/730/491/original/88115c7e08e5ecdc.jpg

2026-08-08 14:39:30 UTC

Hey #FreeBSD folks! I have a host that runs jails and also wireguard tunnels on it. It is NOT the router in my network (that's being performed by the ISP-given router).
The network is dual stack and uses both IPv4 and IPv6. This FreeBSD host not only needs to do routing between the private NAT jails but also the wireguard networks, BUT, it still needs to accept router advertisements from the router.
So gateway_enable and ipv6_gateway_enable are right out because if they're enabled, FreeBSD ignores the router advertisements and IPv6 is basically broken on it (it can't router packets)
I still need net.inet.ip.forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf because I use Wireguard and PF to NAT traffic out to the internet for one of the wireguard clients. So that is OK to set but I just don't have to enable the gateway options in /etc/rc.conf, right?
Does this also mean I won't be able to do any IPv6 routing of traffic in the wireguard tunnels? They have to be IPv4 only?

2026-08-04 23:05:48 UTC

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War the client running Magento as their e-commerce platform before they went to Shopify?
Curious which e-commerce solution it was.

2026-07-30 21:51:09 UTC

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Which form of Tai-Chi do you practice? I learned Yang form about 25 years ago but forgot most of it except killer the first 5 moves.

2026-07-29 06:55:08 UTC

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You too!!!

2026-07-25 14:58:04 UTC

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Yeah. php-fpm.

2026-07-25 14:44:27 UTC

Is there anything decent for #Prometheus and #PHP monitoring? All the PHP exporters look to have been abandoned 4 or more years ago. There also seems to be a lack of decent data from #nginx exporters. I guess for PHP, I'd need to use some kind of OpenTelemetry stuff? For nginx it might have to be feeding access logs into something?

2026-07-20 10:12:28 UTC

Is it possible to bind both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses to a jail? I'm using bastille and for now I've just added the ipv4 (RFC1918) addresses, but I'm running unbound in a jail as a local DNS resolver and I want to let in IPv6 traffic. Thing is, I'm not sure what range to use. Do I use a fc00::/7 ?

2026-07-05 21:37:58 UTC

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Maybe Linux should adopt kqueue. 😂

2026-07-03 22:41:02 UTC

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ooooh YEAHH!

2026-06-29 22:28:20 UTC

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"I spent 5 hours figuring out which IKE and ESP and group numbers to use and didn't murder anyone."

2026-06-29 07:47:14 UTC

ANOTHER #Linux LPE: CVE-2026-43503
If only Linus wasn't so obsessed with calling #OpenBSD developers "masturbating monkey" 18 years ago and actually took security seriously. 🤔
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/torvalds-attacks-it-industry-security-circus-1/

2026-06-19 09:56:46 UTC

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Yeah my biggest problem is I use Mastodon mainly on my phone, so eventually I have like 20-30 tabs open in Waterfox on the phone, then I end up sending myself the URLs in DeltaChat to myself to read on the laptop.

2026-06-18 10:04:22 UTC

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Oh no! Well, at least you'll have it at home! I blame the Romans. 😂

2026-06-18 07:50:41 UTC

Something that drives me crazy about Mastodon: I found an interesting link. I didn't bookmark it in Mastodon. I loaded it in my browser. I finally get around to reading it. I have so many questions but I can't find where it was posted in Mastodon.
Anyone else have this happen?

2026-06-18 07:41:47 UTC

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Perhaps a celebratory "I got fibre installed in the office" Tiramisu!
@npub1y90…900y

2026-06-15 21:45:20 UTC

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Better yet: How much tiramisu?

2026-06-13 14:06:55 UTC

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I tried this. On a Soekris net5501 running OpenBSD. The audio stream would randomly crap out. Might be OK if you wired it in ethernet, but WiFi was really spotty for me.
I was running Navidrome on it which worked well enough when the WiFi was actually working.

2026-06-10 13:33:09 UTC

Can anyone recommend an off-site storage backup vendor like rsync.net (an American company), but who is based in Europe?
Please boost for visibility!

2026-06-06 09:53:37 UTC

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The best Siouxsie and the Banshees album!!

2026-06-01 11:36:53 UTC

Lookie what arrived in the mail today!
Thanks, @npub1ksf…r6s6 ! ❤️
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/116/674/640/772/417/072/original/7b3a4ff033cf5601.jpg

2026-05-31 21:47:44 UTC

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I once had to use ed(1) on Solaris to fix a bad boot. It was... "fun"...

2026-05-30 13:05:08 UTC

Finally got around to updating my script to update my #OpenBSD #pf firewall with @npub1rc8…nu7f 's fantastic parasites.txt. (Apologies if you've seen a bunch of HEAD requests from me, Julian!)
If anyone's interested:
#!/bin/ksh
set -euo pipefail
cd /home/pertho
ftp -TV https://scienceispoetry.net/files/parasites.txt
sed -e '/^[^0-9]/d' parasites.txt | sed '/^$/d' | sed '$d' > parasites.new
doas /usr/bin/install -g wheel -m 0644 -o root /home/pertho/parasites.new /etc/parasites.txt
doas /sbin/pfctl -t parasites -T replace -f /etc/parasites.txt
[ -f /home/pertho/parasites.new ] && rm -f /home/pertho/parasites.new
Please, go easy on Julian's server. Don't blast it with requests. He's providing this for free. (Thank you!!!!)
I use my home directory because I need to store parasites.txt with its timestamps. OpenBSD's ftp (which does talk https) checks the timestamp to see if a newer one is available and only proceeds if there is a newer one.
/etc/doas.conf edited to allow the install and pfctl commands to run (just look in doas.conf(5) for details and use the args)

2026-05-10 07:36:24 UTC

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Absolutely! THIS! I can't read text in 4 pt. font on a HD screen and thin scrollbars that appear and disappear are evil!

2026-03-23 08:10:50 UTC

Every time I see job positions they're from an "AI first" company or "AI forward" (whatever the hell that means)
I want to see job adverts from "AI Never" companies. Damn it!

2026-03-16 23:18:38 UTC

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AI needs to fucking crash & burn.

2026-03-01 08:54:28 UTC

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I lived in New Orleans for 5 months back in '92. The city was different then. Pre-Katrina.

2026-02-26 22:47:04 UTC

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oh that brings back memories.

2026-01-27 23:51:15 UTC

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huh. Their Chief Product Officer was CTO of Pantheon? 😂
Pantheon is garbage web hosting for companies who don't want to hire Sysadmins to do things properly.

2026-01-27 23:40:52 UTC

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I thought he was working at Microslop?

2025-12-06 08:18:22 UTC

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Snac I'm not sure as I never run that but if there's a package or port, it should be doable.
I run relayd and httpd for my static site (TCP/443 and 80), syncthing runs on 22000. Not used radicale but I'm sure you can have that listen on a different port if need be.
I don't run anything in a vmm/vmd.

2025-11-19 22:07:29 UTC

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So much for "No NAT November"! 😉

2025-11-13 15:20:18 UTC

Being a #sysadmin of 26 years has taught me most certifications are a pure money making grift from corporations. Most tech workers who know their stuff don't need these. Nothing beats hands-on experience of technology.
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/115/543/050/353/028/840/original/4eac18a9c360c643.jpg

2025-10-23 22:31:07 UTC

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Have run -current on devices for over a decade and there's only been 2 times a snapshot has gone wrong.

2025-10-20 08:12:44 UTC

AWS widespread outage. Most of the services I use at $day_job are down. Hooray for hosting silos! The Internet is supposed to be decentralized!

2025-09-13 22:35:26 UTC

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Who is T F G?

2025-08-26 11:44:23 UTC

Please 🛑 STOP 🛑 recommending the Brave browser. It is put out by a company run by a massive bigot. Don't support them.

2025-07-09 18:56:48 UTC

Does anyone on the Fediverse who runs #FreeBSD ever got WINE to work properly in 14.3? It just won't play games. I get weird memory issues.
If you do run FreeBSD and WINE to run Windows apps, please share how you got it working. Thanks!
Boosts very welcome!

2025-07-07 12:24:11 UTC

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no sign of this on stock android on Fairphone 5.
Wish I didn't need a Pixel to run @npub1kwa…e0nj otherwise I'd switch to GOS in a heartbeat.

2025-06-10 21:33:43 UTC

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would be a damn shame if it got keyed, now wouldn't it?

2025-01-30 22:42:46 UTC

So like...#matrix ... Which is best to run? Synapse or Dendrite.. or something else?

2024-12-19 12:24:45 UTC

#introduction time...
Hey I'm Tom. Long-time Sysadmin. Came to BSD from Linux in 2005, been a happy BSD user since. I still have to use Linux in my every day work, but I am looking at ways of putting more BSD into use if possible.
I maintain a modest 6 OpenBSD ports (mostly games!)
When I'm not playing around with computers, I like playing my tenor and alto saxophones.