DevOps & SysAdmin

Log files have a way of growing quietly until they fill up your disk at the worst possible moment. I’ve seen it happen more than once — a busy web server accumulating logs, nobody checking, and then one night the disk hits 100% and everything stops. Logrotate prevents this. It’s already installed on most Linux

Every time I set up a new VPS, I go through the same checklist. Some of it is obvious, some of it I learned the hard way, and some of it is just habit at this point. This isn’t a comprehensive security audit — it’s the practical stuff I do within the first hour of

Knowing how to find and manage processes is fundamental sysadmin work. It’s not glamorous, but it comes up constantly — debugging a runaway process eating CPU, finding what’s holding a port open, or tracing which process opened a particular file. ps: The Process Snapshot ps shows a snapshot of current processes. The options are confusing

Cron is one of those tools that’s been around so long and is so widely used that most people learn just enough to make it work, then stop. But there are enough gotchas and useful features that it’s worth understanding properly. The Cron Daemon and Config Files crond (or cron on some systems) is the

Networking is the thing that trips up most people learning Docker. Container A can’t reach container B, or a container can’t reach the internet, or you expose a port but nothing connects. Most of these problems come down to not understanding how Docker’s networking modes actually work. I spent a fair amount of time confused

DNS is something most sysadmins interact with constantly without necessarily understanding the full picture. Setting up an A record and MX record is easy enough, but when things break or you need to configure something more complex, knowing what each record type does and how it works becomes important. Here’s the DNS record types I