System administration topics — Linux, OpenLiteSpeed, MySQL, monitoring.
OpenLiteSpeed already does TLS. Certbot already works against it. So why on earth would you run Caddy in front of LSWS as a sidecar — adding a hop, another process to monitor, and a second config file to keep in …
Plex used to be the answer for “I have a hard drive full of movies and want to watch them on my TV.” Then Plex started showing ads, requiring sign-in, gating features behind subscriptions, and breaking the offline path. Jellyfin …
You write a Python script that needs to run every fifteen minutes on your Mac. You add a line to crontab -e, save, walk away. Two days later you check and notice it never ran. The cron file is …
The “I want my Go binary to bind port 80 without running as root” problem has three solutions of varying terribleness:
The first time I enabled auditd with the default rules on a small VPS, /var/log/audit/audit.log grew to 2 GB in eight hours and I watched the disk fill in real time. The default ruleset is built for compliance audits — …
Most production bash scripts I’ve inherited start with a comment block, then dive straight into echos and mkdirs and cps. They look fine. They run fine, most of the time. They fail mysteriously the one time it …
You’ve bought into one smart-home ecosystem — Hue lights, or SmartThings hub, or Apple HomeKit — and now every new device you consider has to be compatible with that brand. Three years in, you’ve also accumulated a Wyze camera, a …
For about three years I ran monit on every server I owned. It watched processes, restarted them, and emailed me when something fell over. Then I hit a problem monit doesn’t really solve: how do I know when a cron …
Every “best backup tool” comparison on the internet eventually devolves into a feature-matrix between Borg, Restic, and Kopia, and concludes with “they’re all good, pick one.” That’s true, technically, but it doesn’t help when you’re staring at a 200 GB …
RSS isn’t dead — it’s the part of the open web that the algorithm-driven feeds couldn’t kill. The trade is that you have to host the reader yourself if you want the experience to be good. Two reasonable self-hosted options …