The first time you write a backup script, it’s six lines: restic backup /home. The first time it silently stops running, you discover that the only signal something’s wrong is “I went to restore something and the most recent …
The 3-2-1 backup rule is older than this whole industry: 3 copies of the data, on 2 different media types, with 1 of them offsite. It’s the conservative answer for a reason — ransomware can take out one local …
Apple switched the default macOS shell from bash to zsh in Catalina (2019). Most people changed nothing and have been on zsh ever since for interactive use. But if you look at /etc/shells, run which sh, or open …
By default every WordPress install since 4.7 leaks usernames over a public, unauthenticated REST endpoint. Anyone — no login, no auth header, just a browser — can hit https://yoursite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users and get a JSON array of every user the site considers …
Pinboard is the bookmark service hardcore link-collectors swore by for over a decade. The thing was: it was always one person (Maciej Cegłowski), aging gracefully but increasingly out of touch with modern web platforms. Pinboard’s iOS extensions broke after iOS …
You have a backup script. You add it to /etc/crontab. It runs on schedule for a year. Then one day it stops, because the box was suspended for ten minutes during the run window and cron’s “minute X of …
A 4 TB ext4 partition I’d been using as bulk storage on a NAS started returning EIO on a handful of files last month. dmesg was full of EXT4-fs error messages about inode table corruption. The drive itself was healthy …
I had a single mysqldump file go partially-corrupted on S3 last year — exactly one byte flipped somewhere in the middle of a 1.2 GB nightly backup. The kind of thing that should never happen, but did, probably during transit …
Most people use ~/.ssh/config as a glorified shortcut file: Host server with a HostName and a User, save five seconds of typing. That’s the entry point, and it’s fine. But the file is a much more powerful configuration system …
I work from a laptop that sleeps a lot. SSH sessions die when the laptop closes, when the wifi blips, when I move between coffee shops. For years my workflow involved screen -r at the start of every session and …