As the
@bsdcan lists of talks and tutorials have been posted, I can officially announce my presentation:
Don't Freeze in the Cloud: Reclaiming Home Control with NetBSD
In 2010, I was taking more flights than cups of coffee. After a two-week trip, I returned home to a nasty, albeit expected, surprise: an indoor temperature of 7.8°C (46 F). Possessing more time than money, I decided to solve the problem my own way. I built a custom Python-based control system, accessible only via VPN, to manage my heating.
In 2015, after moving houses, this system was demoted to a secondary role, replaced by a shiny, commercial "smart" thermostat. However, I continued to maintain and update my custom solution for fun.
Fast forward to October 2025: major cloud providers faced significant outages. My commercial thermostat became dumber than a mechanical switch. I was reduced to manual two-hour overrides, with no visibility into settings or usage. It was a wake-up call: keeping my home warm should not depend on someone else's server.
I dusted off my solution and adapted it to modern needs - powered, of course, by NetBSD, running on the very same hardware that served my previous home for years.
In this talk, I will share the journey, the technical challenges, and the architectural decisions behind the project. I will demonstrate how NetBSD’s stability and low footprint make it the ideal operating system for long-term, "set-and-forget" home automation, allowing us to reclaim control from the cloud.
Here is the CPU usage graph for the last 24 hours of the FediMeteo VM. A full 24 hours, during which a huge number of people are connecting, helped by the traction gained from being among the top stories on Hacker News and Lobsters, as well as the many shares across the Fediverse.
RAM usage? Active, around 450 MB. Then there is cache, ARC, and so on. But in practice, zero swap in use after days of uptime.
39 jails running, 39 snac instances, nginx serving the homepage, and HAProxy. HAProxy caching enabled. ZFS snapshots every 15 minutes, backups via zfs send and receive every hour. The same hourly schedule applies to the recalculation of cities, countries, and followers for the homepage.
All of this on a 4 euro per month FreeBSD VM.
If anyone has doubts about the quality and efficiency of FreeBSD, this is the data to show.
Time series graph showing CPU usage percentage over roughly 24 hours. The x axis represents time from about 13:00 to 12:00 the next day, and the y axis shows CPU usage from 0 to 100 percent. CPU usage fluctuates mostly between 15 and 35 percent, with periodic rises during daytime and early morning hours. Several short spikes reach around 45 to 55 percent, and one brief peak climbs to about 60 percent. Usage drops to lower levels, around 10 to 20 percent, during late evening and early morning periods. Overall, the graph shows moderate, variable CPU load with occasional sharp peaks.
There is a person on the left saying, "No! I will not switch to Linux", with knives coming out of their mouth.
On the right is another person getting hit with said knives, with Tux, the mascot of Linux, being hit specifically on their chest; they are also bleeding from where the knives hit.
The BSD conferences are magical. The atmosphere is friendly. It's a family - a good one - with different views but a common goal: making great things, making smart choices in a positive environment.
I'm running some tests on my old and trusted Raspberry Pi A+.
I've installed Raspbian - latest release, lite version. At the prompt, it's using 92 MB of RAM, mainly due to systemd and NetworkManager. As soon as you use it (even just for apt), it starts swapping and becomes almost unusable. It took 5 minutes just to install Python.
I tried NetBSD (on the same memory card): 35 MB of RAM used (including Postfix!) and it's totally usable.
Yes, my old python program to control my heaters is still working. I just had to adapt it to python 3 and modify the code so the old ds1820 sensors aren't needed anymore, I can connect it to my mqtt server. And get the temp from the esp8266 I placed many years ago, all around the house. I've also put a relay on one of them and it works fine.
Oh, and all is running on a Raspberry PI Zero W, powered by NetBSD.
Managed to set up my #OpenBSD workstation with a #Logitech USB #webcam and separate audio input / output on onboard snd/0 and usb snd/1. Had to create a little wrapper script to start #Firefox with the necessary env variables to keep things separated, but it worked nicely. How? All because OpenBSD is really well documented! #RunBSD#UNIX#BSD
In Zagreb, I realized my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 is starting to show its age. The battery life is shorter and the system seems slower than it was at the beginning, perhaps also due to the latest OS version. Yesterday, I used the "new" Acer with openSUSE Tumbleweed, running KDE Plasma. It's small, I paid about 500 euros for it, and it has a good monitor, but the battery life is poor, and that's the main reason I still primarily use the Mac. And yet, it gave me a greater sense of speed than the Mac. When one of the BSDs works well enough on this laptop (mainly suspend/resume), it will probably become my daily driver on the go. I need to try OpenBSD 7.8 as soon as it will be out.
it might have some surprises in store for me.
A salesperson had almost convinced a client to move their email from 365 to Google because "they hold all the cards now". I stepped in and suggested they keep their email on servers that they control instead. The salesperson almost mocked me, treating me like a "nerd" who doesn't understand how the world works.
I was happy to be a nerd, if necessary, to explain the pros and cons of the solution to the client.
The result? The salesperson was politely thanked and "sent home", and I'm now evaluating some details of the new mail server, which, by the client's choice, will be based on OpenBSD.
The feeling when some of the Grand Masters and Architects of #UNIX mocks me for being crazy to run modern #NetBSD on decidedly-not-modern hardware while also pointing out how incredibly powerful this 386sx/486-class hardware is and what an absurdly huge amount of memory 16MB is compared to what they had while, you know, developing UNIX..
Marshall Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, a couple of (much) younger BSD developers and myself hovering over an old open-frame PC build which is busy booting NetBSD. Sponsor pull-up poster for Entersekt/Modirum (my employer) in the background.
Support for Windows 10 is ending next month, making it a great time to switch to Linux! There's no need to throw away your old computer. If you primarily use your machine for social media, shopping, or online banking, you can save money and help the environment.
Which distribution would you recommend? Mint or Ubuntu?
PS: For older computers, a lighter weight distribution might be a better choice so ch as Linux Mint XFCE or Lubuntu.
Dear friends of BSD Cafe, I've just approved the 500th user for this instance.
That's right, the 500th friend has just joined the BSD Cafe's Mastodon instance.
This calls for a celebration! :runbsd: :freebsd: :netbsd: :openbsd: :dragonflybsd:
For auto-syncing photos taken on my Android phone to my desktop I decided to use Syncthing. This HOWTO was helpful in getting Syncthing setup on FreeBSD to run as my user:
All BSDCan 2025 videos are now available on Peertube and YouTube ( toobnix.org )
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