DevOps & SysAdmin

Nginx Proxy Cache Configuration: How I Set It Up Without Caching the Wrong Thing

2026-07-25

Nginx proxy_cache can make a struggling application look healthy again, but it can also serve the wrong page to the wrong user if you get sloppy. I have seen both outcomes. The good version is a backend that suddenly stops melting under traffic spikes. The bad version is an authenticated dashboard cached for everyone because […]

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Nginx WebSocket Proxy Configuration: The Settings That Actually Matter

2026-07-25

WebSocket proxying looks deceptively simple until you hit the first timeout, load balancer mismatch, or upgrade failure. I have seen people copy a normal reverse proxy block, change the upstream URL, and assume it is done. Then they wonder why the browser reports a failed handshake, why idle connections die at sixty seconds, or why

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TLS Cipher Suites: Hardening and Configuration That Actually Holds Up

2026-07-24

Cipher suite discussions tend to become abstract fast. You start with a simple question like “what should I put in my Nginx config?” and twenty minutes later you are reading about key exchange, bulk ciphers, MAC construction, AEAD, and browser compatibility from a table last updated three years ago. What helped me was treating cipher

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Nginx Upstream Load Balancing Configuration: What I Actually Tune in Production

2026-07-23

I like Nginx load balancing because it stays boring when the traffic pattern is boring, and that is a compliment. When a setup is healthy, most of the work is invisible. The trouble starts when the upstream layer is copied from an old blog post, nobody logs which backend answered the request, and an intermittent

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Nginx Log Analysis: How I Read Access and Error Logs Without Drowning in Noise

2026-07-21

When a site feels slow or unreliable, I still start with logs more often than dashboards. Metrics help, but logs tell me what actually happened to specific requests. They also expose the ugly details dashboards smooth over: repeated client aborts, a sudden flood of 404s from one broken deploy, one upstream timing out while another

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Linux User and Group Management: A Practical Guide for Sysadmins

2026-07-20

User management is basic Linux administration in the same way plumbing is basic house maintenance: you can ignore it right up until the day it leaks into everything else. Bad user and group hygiene creates permission problems, weak sudo rules, confusing service ownership, and messy offboarding. Good hygiene is not glamorous, but it prevents a

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Linux sysctl Performance Tuning Parameters

2026-07-19

sysctl is one of those Linux tools that attracts two kinds of bad advice. One camp never touches it and leaves obvious workload mismatches unaddressed. The other pastes giant “performance tuning” blocks from random forum posts into /etc/sysctl.conf, reboots, and hopes for free speed. I do not recommend either approach. Kernel parameters absolutely matter, but

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Linux Network Troubleshooting with ss, netstat, tcpdump, and Friends

2026-07-19

When a service “is down,” the network is usually blamed first and understood last. I have seen people restart perfectly healthy daemons because they never checked whether the port was listening, whether a firewall was dropping the traffic, or whether the client was even talking to the right IP. Good network troubleshooting is less about

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Linux Memory Management and Swap Configuration

2026-07-18

Memory problems on Linux rarely start with the machine being literally out of RAM. They usually start with someone looking at free -h, seeing almost all memory marked as used, and assuming the kernel is leaking, the database is bloated, or swap is somehow the root of every evil. I have seen good servers rebooted

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Linux Disk I/O Monitoring with iostat, iotop, and Real Bottleneck Hunting

2026-07-18

Disk I/O problems are some of the easiest Linux performance issues to misread. CPU looks fine, memory is not completely exhausted, load average is high, and the server still feels sticky. Commands hang for a second or two. Databases stutter. Backups start slowly and then drag everything else with them. That is usually when I

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