timedatectl: Time, Time Zones and Why Your Logs Are an Hour Out
Setting the clock is easy. The parts that bite are the two clocks in every machine, the difference between the system time zone and a user's, and what happens to…
lsof and fuser: Finding Out What Is Holding a File, a Port or a Mount
Address already in use. Device or resource busy. Disk full but nothing is using the space. All three are the same question, and lsof answers it in one line.
Sending Email From Your Server (And Why You Probably Should Not Run a Mail Server)
Your application needs to send password resets. That is a solved problem and takes an afternoon. Receiving mail on your own box is a different job entirely, and this is…
Moving an Existing Service Into a Container
Taking something installed with apt and running it in a container instead, without discovering three weeks later that it was writing somewhere you forgot. The inventory, the parallel run, and…
A Home File and Media Server
Storage that other machines can reach, permissions that survive more than one user, Samba and NFS side by side, and media streaming — plus the sentence about RAID that people…
A WireGuard VPN, Set Up Properly
Reaching your own machines from anywhere, in about forty minutes. Key generation, the one setting everybody misunderstands, split versus full tunnel, and how to diagnose a handshake that never happens.
NixOS: A Machine You Describe Rather Than Configure
One file defines the whole system, every change is a new generation you can boot back into, and nothing is installed the usual way. The genuine advantages, the flakes question,…
Void Linux: Rolling, Independent, and Not systemd
Its own package manager, runit instead of systemd, and a choice of glibc or musl. What Void does well, the install images that are eighteen months old, and who it…
Zorin OS and elementary OS: The Two Opinionated Desktops
Both are Ubuntu LTS underneath and both are aimed at people arriving from Windows or macOS — with opposite philosophies. What each actually gives you, what the paid editions add,…
Gentoo: Compiling Everything, and Why You Might Not Have To
USE flags are the real reason to run Gentoo, not speed. What Portage actually does, the official binary packages that changed the trade-off, and an honest account of the time…