MinIO on FreeBSD

MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage platform designed for scalability, resilience, and simplicity in modern cloud-native environments. Its lightweight architecture and impressive throughput make it a popular choice for both on-premises and hybrid deployments, especially when building distributed storage clusters. In this post, I’ll briefly introduce MinIO and then walk through the test environment of a six-node MinIO cluster, exploring how it behaves, performs, and scales in a real-world lab setup.

This test environment is part of potential 1 PB+ S3 Storage system. The conceptual design  of system is depicted below.

Conceptual Design - S3 Object Storage

Proof of Concept is always good idea before the final system is professionally designed. In this blog post I described the first ultra small virtualized environment to test MinIO concept.

FreeBSD - Basic Operational Procedures

FreeBSD is a free, open-source operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a branch of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s known for being stable, secure, highly performant, and extremely well-suited for servers, networking, storage, and appliances.

Relevant blog post: Typical tasks after FreeBSD installation

In this blog post I will document basic FreeBSD 14.3 operational procedures. 

These operational procedures are

• Security Operations
• Lifecycle (Update and Upgrade) of Operating System
• IP Settings
• Date and Time Operations
• IP Firewall Operations

Let's focus on basic operational procedures ... 

SSH Keys on FreeBSD

SSH on my macOS Tahoe 26.1 uses cryptographic algorithm ssh-ed25519. SSH on my FreeBSD 14.3 uses cryptographic algorithm ssh-rsa. 

Why?

The difference between ssh-rsa and ssh-ed25519 SSH keys comes down to cryptographic algorithm, security level, performance, and future-proofing.  

Let's deep dive into details ... 

FreeBSD as a Network Router

FreeBSD is great operating system to be used as router, firewall, and VPN concentrator. When you install and configure FreeBSD router you should begin with standard FreeBSD server installation and configuration covered in another my blog post - Typical tasks after FreeBSD installation.

After typical FreeBSD server installation we can follow with configuration of other roles as

• Firewall and NAT
• WireGuard Site2site VPN tunneling
• Dynamic routing / OpenBGPD
• DNS
• DHCP

In this blog post, I will document various roles basic configurations.

Typical tasks after FreeBSD installation

FreeBSD manual installation from ISO is very simple and straight forward. It typically takes few minutes. In this blog post, I will document my typical tasks after fresh FreeBSD install.

These tasks are

• Update of Operating System
• Change hostname
• Set IP settings and DNS 
• Date and Time settings
• Add users to Operating System 

Relevant blog post: FreeBSD - Basic Operational Procedures 

Let's focus on typical tasks after FreeBSD installation ...