Sometimes, you want a backup mail server. Something that will accept mail and hold it for delivery until your primary mail server is available again. This is the purpose of a backup MX (the MX refers to the type of DNS record that mail exchangers use).

Recently deployed some Opengear serial consoles (love them, they work great). I needed a way to back them up in some kind of automated fashion. Turns out Opengear has written some scripts to work with Rancid .

Sort of a continuation of the last post. This still uses FreeBSD , pfSense , Juniper SRX but it could fairly easily be adapted to OpnSense (fork/clone of pfSense ), and other network vendor appliances.

Telegraf¹ is an agent that is capable of collecting various metrics and exporting them to various storage backends.

If you want to export your FreeNAS¹ reporting information to some kind of monitor/collector, graphite is how its done.

Time Series¹ databases are all the rage right now.

Corrupted TimeMachine backups are annoying. There frequently isn’t any actual problem with the data, just that TimeMachine doesn’t know how to access.

This is a really terrible way of cloning one box to another.

There are plenty of articles that discuss how to handle FreeNAS to FreeNAS replication, its even covered in the FreeNAS documentation (thank you iX Systems for both automatic and manual setups.

In all the vendor documentation I find, examples for setting up IPSec tunnels use some of the worst encryption possible.