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Syslog is the first place you look when something goes wrong. In a busy server or a home lab, the same message can appear thousands of times a day. Knowing which lines dominate the log helps spot misconfigurations, repeated failures, or malicious activity that repeats silently. A quick frequency count is a low‑overhead sanity check that can turn a noisy log into a focused list of suspects.
[Read More]A home NAS is usually a single‑disk or a small RAID array.
When you run several containers—media servers, databases, CI runners—each one writes a JSON log file under
/var/lib/docker/containers/<id>/<id>-json.log.
If you leave the default json-file driver untouched, those files grow indefinitely.
On a 1 TB NAS, a handful of containers can fill the drive in weeks, forcing you to delete data or upgrade hardware.
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I’ve run Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL for the past two decades, and firewalld is the default manager on those distros. It hides the nitty‑gritty nftables/iptables behind zones, services, and ports. That abstraction is handy, but it can also mask a subtle mismatch that ends up dropping HTTP traffic even though you’ve “opened” port 80. The culprit is almost always a services vs. ports trap.
[Read More]Adding a Windows‑style partition to a Linux system is a routine part of dual‑booting or sharing data with a PC.
When the entry in /etc/fstab is off by a single character, the initramfs aborts the boot and you end up in emergency mode.
The message is unmistakable:
Failed to mount /mnt/windows.
Failed to mount all filesystems.
Entering emergency mode.
Below is a quick, practical walk‑through to diagnose and fix the problem—no fluff, just what I do on the spot.
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When a web server runs as www-data and the dev squad needs to touch files in /var/www/html, the quick fix is usually chgrp the directory and slap a write bit on the group. That swaps the group ownership, which can trip up services that expect the original group or automated deploy scripts that hard‑code the owner. ACLs let you hand out the right permissions without touching the classic ownership columns.
When you run sudo, you’re stepping into privileged territory. Most distros ship a sudo wrapper that dumps a message into syslog. That message can be noisy, hard to sift through, and it doesn’t survive a clean‑up or a reboot. A dedicated auditd rule, on the other hand, captures every sudo invocation in a structured, tamper‑evident format. Couple that with a tiny logrotate config, and you get a reliable audit trail that sticks around long after the machine has been rebooted or the disk wiped.
On a busy server you’ll often see df still showing plenty of space, but df -i screaming 100 % inode usage on a mount like /usr. The kernel will happily refuse to create any more files, even though there’s room on disk. The culprit is usually a deluge of tiny files—think logs, temp data, or a mis‑configured service that never cleans up.
# Space vs. inodes
df -h /usr
df -i /usr
If the first command reports 20 GB free but the second is 100 % used, you’ve hit an inode shortage. Now find the directory that’s eating them.
[Read More]When a 1‑GB VPS runs a handful of services that write temporary files—apt‑get, pip, Docker, or even a simple web server—the /tmp directory can fill up faster than you think. Once the filesystem is full, many processes abort, the kernel starts killing tasks, and the machine can become unresponsive. The fix is surprisingly simple: mount /tmp as a tmpfs so it lives in RAM instead of on the disk.