Category Archives: HOWTO’s

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 5 – ZFS pool, datasets, snapshots, and ZFS monitoring
5 (3)

27 December 2025

Continuing the “for fun and profit” journey of setting up my home server with FreeBSD on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720s SFF. And today, finally, we will do the main part – set up a ZFS pool on real disks, look at working with datasets, encryption, snapshots, and monitoring. All posts in this blog series: FreeBSD:… Read More: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 5 – ZFS pool, datasets, snapshots,… »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 4 – Local DNS with Unbound
5 (1)

26 December 2025

In the previous post, FreeBSD: WireGuard VPN, Linux peer and routing between networks, we set up a VPN to connect two networks – my office and home – and everything is working perfectly. However, currently, to connect to any host in the networks, you have to specify an IP address. Of course, you could manually… Read More: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 4 – Local DNS with Unbound5… »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 3 – WireGuard VPN, Linux peer, and routing
4.1 (15)

25 December 2025

I am continuing to set up my home server on FreeBSD 14.3, which is intended to serve as a NAS. In the previous post, FreeBSD: introduction to Packet Filter (PF) firewall, we got acquainted with firewalls; the next step is to configure a VPN for access. The main idea is to (finally!) connect my “office”… Read More: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 3 – WireGuard VPN, Linux peer,… »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 2 – introduction to Packet Filter (PF) firewall
3.7 (6)

24 December 2025

I’m continuing to gradually set up my home NAS on FreeBSD, and the first thing I want to dive into is FreeBSD firewalls. I used to work with IPFW back in the day – FreeBSD: initial setup of IPFW, from 2012. Currently, there are three “built-in” firewalls in the system – Packet Filter (PF), IP… Read More: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 2 – introduction to Packet Filter… »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
4.8 (5)

23 December 2025

I have an idea to set up a home NAS on FreeBSD. For this purpose, I bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720s SFF – it’s quiet, compact, and offers the possibility to install 2 SATA III SSDs plus a separate M.2 slot for an NVMe SSD. What is planned: on NVMe SSD: UFS and FreeBSD on… Read More: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)4.8… »

FreeBSD: Installation on a ThinkPad X200 Tablet in 2025
0 (0)

23 December 2025

I’ve been a ThinkPad fan for a long time; I really love their entire lineup. Recently, I came across the X200 model, which was manufactured starting in 2008 – I just saw a picture somewhere and really wanted it for my “collection.” Unexpectedly, it was even available for sale in Ukraine, so I bought this… Read More: FreeBSD: Installation on a ThinkPad X200 Tablet in 20250 (0) »

VictoriaMetrics: Recording rules for AWS Load Balancer logs
0 (0)

6 December 2025

Continuing the topic of AWS Load Balancer logs: in the previous post, Golang: recording AWS Load Balancer logs to VictoriaLogs, we collected logs using our own logs collector in Golang. Now we need to get something useful out of these logs. Previously, when I had Loki on my project, we used its RecordingRules to create… Read More: VictoriaMetrics: Recording rules for AWS Load Balancer logs0 (0) »

Golang: writing an AWS Load Balancer logs collector for VictoriaLogs
5 (1)

6 December 2025

The next task I want to do with Golang is building a custom log collector that retrieves AWS Application Load Balancer logs from S3 and sends them to VictoriaLogs. Sure, we could simply use Vector.dev, like what I did for AWS VPC Flow Logs (see: Vector.dev introduction, logs from AWS S3, and VictoriaLogs integration). But… Read More: Golang: writing an AWS Load Balancer logs collector for VictoriaLogs5… »

Golang: creating OpenAI Exporter for VictoriaMetrics
0 (0)

23 November 2025

Got a new task to monitor costs on OpenAI – to see how much each project spends per day, and send alerts to Slack if costs exceed a set threshold. I tried several existing exporters for the OpenAI API, but none provided cost metrics per project – so we’ll build one ourselves. To create the… Read More: Golang: creating OpenAI Exporter for VictoriaMetrics0 (0) »

Kubernetes: monitoring processes with process-exporter
0 (0)

1 November 2025

We are debugging one issue with memory usage in Kubernetes Pods, and decided to look at the memory and number of processes on the nodes. The problem is that a Kubernetes Pod with Livekit usually consumes about 2 gigabytes of memory, but sometimes there are spikes of up to 10-11 gigabytes, which causes the Pod… Read More: Kubernetes: monitoring processes with process-exporter0 (0) »