System administration topics — Linux, OpenLiteSpeed, MySQL, monitoring.
I’ve been running fail2ban on this Oracle box since the day I provisioned it. Six months ago I added CrowdSec because I wanted the community blocklist for SSH brute-force IPs. For three months they coexisted and I assumed it was …
I have a 4 GB Oracle ARM box that, by all rights, should not be running everything I run on it: LSWS with eight WordPress sites, a Postfix relay, fail2ban, CrowdSec, Tailscale, three small Node services, and a couple of …
You edit /etc/hosts on your Mac to point api.staging.example.com at a local Docker container. You hit it in the browser. It still resolves to the live AWS IP. You hit it from curl. Same thing. You wonder if your …
You’re spinning up a $5/month VPS to host one or two WordPress sites. The web server choice is one of the early decisions that’s hard to undo later because the rest of your config — vhost files, cache layer, TLS …
For years, “exFAT on Linux” was a chore. The proprietary spec, the licensing fights, and the patchy out-of-tree drivers meant most distros shipped exfat-fuse — a userspace FUSE driver that worked but was slow and occasionally corrupted partitions on unclean …
OpenLiteSpeed’s admin panel runs on port 7080 by default and binds to *. That means anyone with your server’s IP can hit https://your-ip:7080/ and reach the admin login form. The form has authentication, sure — but having a login …
You set up a cron job. It runs nightly at 3 AM. Some nights it succeeds; some nights it doesn’t — but you never know which because cron’s only feedback is supposed to be email, and email-from-cron has been silently …
Your VPS is down. You don’t know it yet because nobody’s pinged you. The customer who emailed at 3 AM gets the “our server is unavailable” auto-responder, but it’s actually a real outage. By the time you wake up and …
I had a server running fail2ban happily for two years. SSH brute-force IPs were getting banned, the f2b-sshd chain was active, all good. Then I ran ufw enable to add a quick firewall rule for an internal service — and …
You SSH into a server, start a long-running build inside tmux, close the laptop lid to walk to lunch, come back fifteen minutes later — and your terminal greets you with Connection to server.example.com closed by remote host. The …