System administration topics — Linux, OpenLiteSpeed, MySQL, monitoring.
You sit down at a coffee shop, click the Wi-Fi prompt, and accept the captive portal. Your laptop is now on a network where the person at the next table can run tcpdump on the SSID and see your unencrypted …
The first time I filled / on a single-drive ZFS box was a Sunday at 2 AM. zfs list said the pool had 800 GB free; df said / was at 100%; the system was unhappy in that quiet, refuses-to-write-but-doesn’t-crash …
You wrote a deploy script. It SSHes into 12 servers, runs an update, comes home. The first time you run it on a fresh laptop, every server prompts: The authenticity of host ‘203.0.113.x’ can’t be established. Continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])?. …
You want to share a thing on your home server with someone outside your house. Maybe you wrote a small status page, or you want a friend to grab a file, or you’re showing a client a Caddy-served Astro preview. …
You’ve been paying $40/year for a Bitwarden family plan, or $36/year for an individual one. The product is excellent — there’s nothing wrong with what they’ve built. But you also have a $5/month VPS that’s already running a couple of …
Most Linux distros now ship nftables as the default firewall backend, with iptables kept around as a compatibility wrapper (iptables-nft). On Ubuntu 22 you’re already running nftables under the hood whether you know it or not — the …
Every six to eighteen months, a new note-taking app shows up that’s the one. Notion, Roam, Obsidian, Logseq, Mem, Reflect, Tana, Bear, Apple Notes (again, with new AI features), Craft, Capacities, the next-Notion. Some are great. None of them have …
Syncthing’s pitch is “set it up once and your folders are identical across every device.” That’s the truth, but the path to “set up once” has more sharp edges than the docs admit. The classic gotcha — Syncthing falls back …
You have a WordPress site that’s returning HTTP 200, the homepage renders, but something’s quietly off. WooCommerce features aren’t loading. LiteSpeed Cache settings page is empty. The Mailpoet sender isn’t sending. None of these would normally fail at the same …
You write a script. You run it from your shell — it works perfectly. You add it to crontab to run hourly — it silently fails. The script’s still there, the cron’s firing on schedule, but the actual command is …