The Cluster You Do Not Watch
I almost never open Grafana any more. This is the operations architecture that made that true, on under US$10 a month of infrastructure — an agent that reads everything and writes nothing directly,…
Backing up my Bear notes to Hetzner
The Bear notes app recently added a CLI for interacting with your notes. Let's use it to build a script for creating backups of my notes! Prerequisites Here is the stack I am using: Bear (duh) Fish…
The ECDSA tax: a field guide to threshold signing
Two vendors sell you an “MPC wallet”. Both keep the key in shares that never meet, both produce ordinary signatures, both have a whitepaper with a lock icon on it. One of them signs in…
Devlog #1: vitald v0.1.0 — Building a Self-Hosted Health Data Pipeline
This is a write-up of a weekend project, vitald, I made after buying a Google Fitbit Air (I’m slowly transitioning out of the Apple ecosystem). One of the main reasons I gravitated towards the Fitbit…
Postgres as an isolation reference model
Use PostgreSQL's transaction isolation levels as a reference model for reasoning about the guarantees and tradeoffs of other relational and non-relational databases.
Anubis continues to expose new ways people configure webservers
TL;DR: if admins turn off browser features, those features won't work in confusing ways that are annoying to debug
Devbox: a pattern for development in the cloud
A post about how I do AI-assisted development in the cloud, with a link to a Github repo for setting it up yourself.
A Boolean PII Flag Is Not Enough
Every data catalog lets you tag a column as PII, true or false. For a platform processing student data under GDPR this single bit drops the questions a data protection officer actually asks: Does the…
AWS IAM Identity Center: Account Access Is Now Optional — And Why That Matters
AWS Identity Center can now be provisioned without pushing the service-linked role into every member account. A real blast radius reduction for orgs that use Identity Center only for SaaS SSO.…
🧱 Foundations
While we have many options in choosing technology, there are a few foundational things that are prudent to put in place early. Each costs little while the system is young and a great deal to retrofit…
Perspective
The power was out in our area of Maui for over 48 hours due to Hurricane Lala. This is the second time this year that we’ve experienced a multi-day outage due to storms, and this is a typical…
Monitoring Non-interactive Terminal Sessions with Sentinel
Lately I have found myself dealing with more and more terminal sessions on my Mac. These were not just sessions where I had specific areas of work open. These were long running processes. Local…
How can you securely share a secret number with someone, totally in public? Elliptic Curves
How do you totally securely share a secret number with someone, utterly in public, without anybody else being able to get it?
My practical approach to surfing the web safely
The web is a dangerous place. While modern browser security architecture protects against many threats, security vulnerabilities are found and fixed every day. Through security exploits, malicious…
Performance Comparison: gzip vs Brotli vs Zstd
This is a continuation of the post Performance Comparison: gzip vs Brotli three years ago. Here we will present measurements for three compression algorithms (gzip, brotli, and zstd) employed on two…
ISO/IEC 27017 (cloud security) updated
After more than a decade, the first edition of ISO/IEC 27017 and ITU-T recommendation X.1631 has been updated. The standard advises both Cloud Service Customers and Cloud Service Providers, providing…
Thinking about other industries like we think about data centers shows how impoverished the debate is
Clumsy, arbitrary environmental ideas ignore the incredible complexity of the systems modern society depends on
Codeberg Pages 2: Setting Up Subdomain for git-pages Back-end
Read on the website: Codeberg Pages moved to a new back-end (git-pages.) This caused me some pain. But I’m now on the other side of it, and I want to share some gotchas.
rpmdb: DB_RUNRECOVERY Errors When Using dbaascli on Exacc
To register a manually created database on Exacc using dbaascli, a DBNAME.ini file must be created first. A specific command may fail due to a corrupted RPM database under /var/lib/rpm, showing a…
The future of AI is private
Two curves are crossing. Model quality is a wasting edge and hardware is sprinting the other way. When they cross for good, intelligence stops being a subscription and becomes a utility you own. Here…
Beware Monster, Michael Parks, and Linear
Monster appears to be a relentless source of identity theft scams with “Michael Parks” and Linear being the latest. Monster must be making money from these identity theft scams because…
"Castles Made of Sand": The fragility of enforced privacy protections
It is fair to say that one of Apple’s core tenets is its commitment to user privacy. The term appears 123 times in the Apple Platform Security Guide . Privacy. That's Apple. What this means for the…
Privacy Tool Spotlight: Home Assistant Assist
Discover private voice control with Home Assistant Assist. Explore the voice pipeline and local options that keep your smart home conversations offline and private.
Deploy an app with biff.tasks
I demonstrate how to provision a new Ubuntu server on DigitalOcean and deploy a hello-world Clojure web app to it with biff.tasks. biff.tasks
DePIN is Dead. Long Live Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
Every infrastructure sector in modern history developed using the same playbook. Someone builds raw capacity ahead of demand. The raw resource commoditizes and gets cheaper forever. And the money…
How senior leaders disrupt incidents just by showing up
A senior leader who joins an incident channel and says nothing still changes the room. The disruption isn't caused by anything they do. It's caused by what they are.
How to actually use a password manager (Advisorator)
Password managers are supposed to make your online accounts more secure and easier to access, but they can also cause problems. Read more › The post How to actually use a password manager appeared…
IPv6 Ready!
Annoucing that our web services now support IPv6.
AADSTS75011 - OpenVPN Access Server Entra SAML Fails with FIDO2 / Passkeys
Updated 08/29/26 - A support case I opened with OpenVPN’s engineers confirmed this solution. Despite multiple attempts to use other contexts like SmartcardPKI and SoftwarePKI, disabling…
Git for Network Engineers, Part 4: Going Pro
So, your runbook repo is now shared. Three of you commit to it, the playbooks get used in real change windows, and last Tuesday somebody pushed broken YAML straight to main without anyone noticing.…
GitHub tokens for agent fleets — safe automation without paste-a-PAT
How to give coding agents GitHub access without long-lived PATs in chat: short-lived App tokens, a deterministic credential broker, personal vs bot identity, and fail-closed landing.
Top 10 Ways to Reduce .NET Memory Usage in Kubernetes
If your .NET pods are each using 1–2 GB of RAM, you may be leaving a lot of pod density — and money — on the table. Here are the first things I would look at. 1. Set Realistic Kubernetes Memory…
check_smart monitoring plugin 6.18.3 released
The newest release, 6.18.3, is a bugfix release and fixes or improves a couple of things.
Sovellusten hakkerointi
Find vulnerabilities in your app - before criminals do. This is "Application hacking" in Finnish: "Sovellusten hakkerointi ja haavoittuvuudet". In nerd speak, it's reverse…
Non-Graphical Linux Environment Part 2
This post goes over some boring details of making the virtual console more comfortable to work with. There is some systemd-related stuff.
Foiling a Protohackers email spam bot
I've been receiving lots of "Undeliverable Mail Returned to Sender" lately for Protohackers signup attempts. Protohackers login is via a "magic link", so attempting to sign up or log in results in…
My first go at tracking down a kernel bug…
A couple of weekends back, I upgraded my home sever. It failed to restart after running apt dist-upgrade The only update that was performed was to the kernel, it went from 6.12.88+deb13-amd64 to…
Asynchronous Replication of Snapshots from an ActiveCluster Pod to a Third Array
I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something I’ve wanted for a long time. If you’ve ever designed a SQL Server environment on ActiveCluster, you…
Migrating TrueNAS SCALE from 2-Disk Mirror to 3-Disk RAIDZ1
A complete guide to migrating TrueNAS SCALE from a 2-disk mirror to 3-disk RAIDZ1, including all the post-migration fixes for ix-apps, SMB shares, and application datasets.
Graceful shutdown with HTTP and gRPC in Go
A quick example of how to do graceful shutdown of your gRPC and HTTP server in Go, particularly useful on Kubernetes.
Almost scammed
I was nearly scammed recently, which would have resulted in the scammer getting access to my credit card. Friday afternoon last week, I got a…
BCC tools in a debug container
BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more https://github.com/iovisor/bcc $ kubectl debug node/default-pool-3mrgkk --image debian -it --profile=sysadmin…
pg_subscription is a shared catalog
How is this possible?? postgres=# alter subscription "pgo_lr_sub_l1_myapp_875a65d6" enable; ERROR: subscription "pgo_lr_sub_l1_myapp_875a65d6" does not exist postgres=# select * from pg_subscription;…
Ethernet Driver Features in 7.2
A report of features and offloads implemented by ethernet drivers in Linux kernel 7.2.
Post 255 - New MeshDash at my Home Server
New MeshDash at my Home Server - I wanted something to monitor Meshtastic and LoRa in general around me, for example: new messages, nodes around, GPS changes etc., so I can see what's going on around…
Install Home Assistant with Docker on Raspberry Pi: Full Setup, Real Resource Usage (with MariaDB Recorder)
Last Updated on 18th August 2026 by peppe8o tested by peppe8o | Home Assistant Container 2026.8.1, MariaDB 12.3.2 | RPi 4 B 4GB | Raspberry Pi OS 13 (Trixie) In this tutorial,…
Flywheels, Batteries, and Standby Generators: What 40 Years of Trade Magazines Say About Backing Up a Datacenter
Research report · Internet Archive holdings · 17 August 2026 Short answer: the engineering trade press litigated every element of the modern datacenter backup-power design between 1996 and 2010, and…
She Lost $4.3 Million In Terrifying 2 Month Digital Arrest
An Arizona woman lost $4.3 million in an elaborate digital arrest scheme where criminals posed as FBI Agents and NYPD officers. The woman was held hostage in her home for two months as agents told…
Russian Poseidon-Carrier Submarine Khabarovsk Starts Sea Trials
 Russia’s new Pr. 09851 class submarine, _Khabarovsk_, has started sea trials after fitting out and degaussing in Severodvinsk in the Russian Arctic...[Read…
NSW’s new data centre guidelines
Digging into the details of NSW’s new data centre guidelines that were announced today. These are for a ‘go faster’ process as opposed to minimum standards of the sort being…