Dear community,

this is not an easy message to write.

After many years of running BoxyBSD, the time has come to officially shut the project down.

BoxyBSD started with a simple and clear mission: to provide an accessible platform for learners and beginners to explore BSD-based systems without the need for spare hardware, prior knowledge, or complex setup. It was meant to be a place where anyone could spin up real virtual machines, work with fixed and static IPs, and benefit from globally distributed locations for low latency testing. A playground, a lab, and a learning environment all in one.

From day one, BoxyBSD has been a one-person project, operated and maintained solely by gyptazy. Over the years, the platform has provisioned more than 2000 VPS instances completely free of charge. At no point did we ask for donations, and in fact, we never received a single penny. This was always intentional.

The goal was never to monetize, but to give back to the community.

Unfortunately, the situation has now changed. At least from the operational point of view. We are currently facing a major hardware issue affecting the core platform, specifically the control, monitoring, and management infrastructure. While the distributed clusters themselves remain unaffected, the central systems required to operate BoxyBSD reliably are no longer in a sustainable state.

Resolving this would not only require a significant investment of time, but also personal financial resources for new hardware. Given current market conditions, I have made the difficult decision that I am no longer willing to continue investing both at the level required to keep the project running.

As many of you know from my other projects, I have never asked for financial support, and I do not intend to start now.
As a result, and after careful consideration, I have decided to close down BoxyBSD.

This project has been an incredible journey. I sincerely hope that BoxyBSD helped some of you take your first steps into the world of BSD, and perhaps even Solaris. Seeing people learn, experiment, and grow with the platform has always been the most rewarding part.

Thank you to everyone who used BoxyBSD, supported it, and made it what it was. Current users with boxes please check your email, Discord or Matrix! All boxes will be terminated by the 1st of May 2026.

It has been a great time!

Thanks,
@gyptazy

New report from Palo Alto’s Unit42 on sophisticated attacks with long dwell times by one or more Chinese threat groups. There is a lot going on in this article and much of it likely doesn’t apply to my organization, but I try to learn from reports like this at least one thing that I can bring to my organization to improve our security posture. In this case I learned about DumpIt — a new-to-me free multiplatform forensics tool. I’m going to add that to an upcoming threat hunt and will build detections for it as well. #cybersecurity #threatintel

https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/cl-unk-1068-targets-critical-sectors/

This has been one of the most insane projects yet that I've taken on in relation to my "taking my data back" campaign..

https://rant.mvh.dev/ditching-cloudflare-tunnels-migrating-90-services-to-pangolin/

#pangolin #selfhost #technology

Things have been happening on the @nzyme side.

All made in US/Europe, no Chinese (or similar) components.

Another finding that was really surprising these days:

You can now selectively use #Cloudflare for only a few subdomains in their free tier! No more “all or nothing”.

I can keep hosting my own DNS now and use CNAME to delegate some subdomains to Cloudflare if I wish. It requires one single domain hosted on their DNS which is okay to me since I anyway had a domain “<me>-net.net” in addition to my internal “<me>-intra.net” domain.

#selfhosting #diday #homelab #digitalindependenceday

Time to announce it formally - here's info about my latest project, SECOND HAND COMPUTER. Check out the attached blog post for information about this fantasy-computer for text games!

And it includes SWORDS OF FREEPORT inbuilt!

https://goodnameforablog.com/posts/second-hand-computer/

#GameDev #IndieDev #FantasyComputer

I tip my hat to #Bose for giving owners of soon-to-be End of Life/support speakers the garantuee that the devices will continue to function and giving them the information needed to collectively build new tools to do even more with them. Thank you, Bose!

https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life

When I took @gilahava704 to the hospital last month, the preschool cartoon "Bluey" was on the waiting room TV. Neither of us had seen it before but not only did we watch it then while stressing out, after we got home we've deliberately watched it most days since. It seems we're a couple of middle-aged child-free "Bluey" fans now.

I know it's been out for ages and we're pretty late to the game, but it's such a delight and you should probably check it out if you haven't.

#Bluey #TV #Television