Michael W Lucas

> Single disks were never a recommended option for ZFS, it's a filesystem designed for arrays.

Not quite true IMHO. One of best features of ZFS is checksumming to ensure data integrity, where errors can be corrected if you have enough redundancy.

You certainly lose this feature with single disks, but you're not necessarily worse off than any other file system.

What ZFS gives you on a single disk is very convenient snapshots and very convenient (incremental) streaming of those snapshots to another system (via either a push or pull mechanism). Doing this with other file systems generally entail a lot more work and much less efficiency. btrfs can do it, but if you're using ext4, then you'll probably use rsync which has to walk the file tree to find changed files.

Also with ZFS and snapshots you can turn them into clones: writable copies. This allow boot environments were updates/upgrades can be done, and if things do not work out, you can boot back to the original setup:

* https://mwl.io/archives/2363

* https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/upgrade-freebsd-with-zfs-boot-environments/

I agree with this post so hard. Email is the foundation for people's life online. In fact I am working on building a better self hosted mail platform in my free time because I believe in having the freedom to move your email to wherever you choose.

Running your own mail server has a bad stigma around it that doesn't have to be true. I understand it is not a task for everyone, but it doesn't have to this don't bother just use Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail etc etc mentality. I have been running my own since 2002 and I would never consider doing anything else for such an important part of my life.

The big mail providers have built a walled garden to hold your email communications hostage and they want you to believe that you can't send email without them. There are many of us that know that is bullshit and it is time to move the needle back. I am excited to read Run Your Own Mail Server by Michael W Lucas when it comes out in Aug.

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ryoms

On a slightly related note, Michael W. Lucas[1] is working on an upcoming book entitled "Run Your Own Mail Server", that will be published shortly (there's a Kickstarter campaign as well[2]).

I attended his tutorial and talk at BSDCan[3] this year and both were excellent. I highly recommend buying the book when it comes out (or supporting the Kickstarter), it will go through all the gory details of setting up and running a mail server, and best practices, including a ton of material on SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

(P.S. I have no affiliation with the author or the book in any way.)

[1] - https://mwl.io/

[2] - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/run-your-own-mail-server

[3] - https://www.bsdcan.org/2024/

I suspect there is but I dont know about it (I use SmartOS / Triton). There is a small list of jail management tools [1]. If it doesnt exist it should be really easy to make since FreeBSD jails (usually) sit on ZFS you can easily use "ZFS send" to create a image of the ZFS dataset. All that one would need to add is some (minor) tooling.

On the more "heavy side" I know that for example Project Fifo has experimental FreeBSD support [2] in case you want to host multiple FreeBSD machines with jails on them.

[1] https://mwl.io/archives/2291
[2] https://docs.project-fifo.net/docs/freebsd

Not sure what do you want, from the Sys Admin point of view or the IPv6 itself?

For Sys Admin, this book is helpful, "Networking for System Administrators":

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/networking

For IPv6 this Cisco book is one of the best books on the subject, "IPv6 Fundamentals: A Straightforward Approach to Understanding IPv6", 2nd Edition:

https://www.ciscopress.com/store/ipv6-fundamentals-a-straightforward-approach-to-understanding-9781587144776