BSD Cafe - Technical Details

Currently, the infrastructure of BSD Cafe relies entirely on FreeBSD, with both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity.

The base setup is divided into jails:

• A dedicated jail hosts Nginx, serving as a reverse proxy. It manages certificates and directs traffic. This is also serving the https://element.bsd.cafe Matrix web client
• Another jail contains a small OpenSMTPD server, handling email dispatch internally to avoid external service reliance.

The https://mastodon.bsd.cafe instance is structured as follows:

• A jail holds KeyDB, essential for communication among Mastodon services - the nervous system of BSD Cafe.
• Another jail runs KeyDB for the Mastodon cache
• Another jail runs PostgreSQL, serving as the database - the memory of BSD Cafe.
• There's a separate jail designated for media storage, acting as the 'multimedia memory' of BSD Cafe. This jail resides on an external server with rotating disks behind Cloudflare. There are reverse proxies located in various parts of the world that receive and cache requests, serving them from the nearest server. The goal is to use georeplicated caching of multimedia data to reduce bandwidth consumption. The selection of reverse proxies is handled at the DNS level through a PowerDNS LUA script. More details have been documented here: Building a Self-Hosted CDN for BSD Cafe Media
• Two jails host the Mastodon application itself, including sidekiq, puma, and streaming components. This is where all processing and connection management occur. They're running in different hosts and are both providing some sidekiq queues and one of the two is set as a backup puma and streaming server when the first one (more powerful) is down. This is useful when updating, to avoid downtime.

https://wiki.bsd.cafe is confined within a single jail and runs the nginx, php and (of course) the DokuWiki CMS.

https://miniflux.bsd.cafe is structured similarly, contained within a single jail, housing both the Miniflux software and PostgreSQL. In this case, we utilize a local installation.

https://freshrss.bsd.cafe is a single jail service, housing both the FreshRSS stack (Apache and PHP) and PostgreSQL.

https://matrix.bsd.cafe is structured similarly, contained within a single jail, housing both the Synapse software, PostgreSQL and the Whatsapp bridge. In this case, we utilize a local installation.

https://blendit.bsd.cafe is composed of two FreeBSD jails: one for PostgreSQL, and the other contains the rest (the frontend in Node and the backend in Rust).

https://brew.bsd.cafe is a FreeBSD jail running PostgreSQL, KeyDB and Forgejo.

https://snac.bsd.cafe is a FreeBSD jail running Snac2. Only a few strict Snac2 dependencies have been installed.

https://status.bsd.cafe is a FreeBSD jail running Uptime Kuma. This will monitor the other services' reachability and lives in an external VPS.

All communication takes place through a Wireguard routed setup. More details here: https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/08/01/evolving-bsd-cafe-from-bridging-to-routing/

Some network statistics are available at https://netstats.bsd.cafe

Backups are systematically generated via ZFS snapshots and externally replicated across two distinct machines located in separate data centers, different from the production VPS data center.