FreeBSD

Motivation Running your own mail server goes far beyond simply sending and receiving messages. With the rise of TLS downgrade attacks, spoofing, and SMTP traffic interception, adopting modern standards like DANE, DNSSEC, and TLSA is no longer optional for anyone who takes security seriously. This post documents the hardening process of a mail server running Postfix 3.11 on FreeBSD, all the way to achieving 100% on Internet.nl — with a Hall of Fame entry. ...

The idea was simple: give a second life to two battle-hardened Seagate IronWolf 2TB drives (with over 6 years of continuous uptime) as a high-speed Media Server. The chosen “brain” was a Mini PC running the rock-solid FreeBSD. All I needed was a Dual Bay USB 3.0 external enclosure (DAS) to connect the drives. What I didn’t expect was that this simple premise would turn into a full-blown saga against haunted firmwares and terrible hardware quality — until I finally reached the perfect setup. ...