2026-09-12 –, D.0.02
It was the night of 10 March 2021, and I had only just fallen asleep. A notification woke me. Then another, then another. Different servers, different workloads, but all with one thing in common: the same data centre.
I got up to check. A temporary connectivity issue? Then a tweet: a fire had gutted SBG2. It was threatening SBG1, SBG3 and SBG4 as well.
My wife looked at me and asked if I wanted a coffee. I nodded. The mission was simple to state and much harder to carry out: bring the critical services back up before 8, and restore everything else as quickly as possible.
It was going to be a long day.
In this talk, I will tell the story of what happened that night: the recovery, the architectural choices that saved us and the ones that turned out to be fragile at the very worst moment, because people usually only talk about the ones that worked.
Above all, I will explain why, ever since, I have looked at BSD systems not as mere operating systems, but as practical tools for building infrastructure that is simpler, easier to understand and more resilient. That night, I learned that first hand.
Stefano Marinelli is an IT Consultant with over two decades of experience in the realms of IT consulting, training, research, and publishing. His expertise spans across operating systems, with a special emphasis on BSD systems - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD - and Linux. Stefano is also the Barista at BSD Cafe, a vibrant community hub for BSD enthusiasts, and has led the FreeOsZoo project at the University of Bologna, making open-source operating system images accessible for virtual machines.