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Systemd’s journal is a reliable source of operational data, but raw journalctl output is hard to sift through at scale. Loki, Grafana’s log aggregation system, can ingest journal entries and expose them through Grafana dashboards. The setup below runs entirely on a single Debian‑based home‑lab server, uses Docker Compose for simplicity, and keeps security tight by running services with the least privilege needed.
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If you boot into a black screen and the kernel spits out
Failed to mount /home
you’re almost certainly dealing with a stale or wrong UUID in /etc/fstab.
Systemd uses that UUID to locate the block device, and if it can’t find a match, the
mount unit dies and the user session never starts.
# Show all block devices with their UUIDs
sudo blkid
# Or a tree view
sudo lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT,UUID
Look for the entry that should be /home. If the UUID printed here differs from the one in fstab, that’s your mismatch.
If the device itself is gone (say you unplugged an SSD), you’ll have to rebuild the partition or point /home elsewhere.
/tmp is the classic “dump‑ground” for most Linux programs.
Because it’s world‑writable, a non‑root user can drop a rogue binary, swap out a shared library, or trick a set‑uid helper into loading code from there.
In 2025 a handful of local privilege‑elevation bugs (e.g., CVE‑2025‑1234) took advantage of that writable surface to inject payloads into privileged processes.
The fix? Make /tmp read‑only for everyone but root.
When a single server hosts several user accounts—think a web developer, a database admin, and a system operator—sharing the same SSH key across those accounts is tempting but risky. A compromised key gives an attacker full access to every account it’s authorized for. Keeping distinct key pairs per account limits blast radius, simplifies revocation, and lets you apply per‑user restrictions in authorized_keys.
# On the client, generate a key for the web dev
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/webdev_id_ed25519 -C "[email protected]"
# For the DB admin
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/dbadmin_id_ed25519 -C "[email protected]"
I always pick ed25519 because it’s faster and still strong. Store the private keys with chmod 600. Push the public key to the server for each user:
I’ve seen container logging become a major headache for many of us managing containerized applications. With containers being adopted more widely in production environments, the need for efficient and scalable logging solutions has become increasingly important. Tools like Loki and systemd Journal have significantly changed the landscape in recent years. In this article, I’ll share how to use Loki and systemd Journal to tame those unruly container logs.
[Read More]I’ve been using resolvectl for a while now, and I’ve found it to be a powerful tool for managing DNS resolution on Linux systems that use systemd. It provides a flexible and efficient way to configure DNS settings, including DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH). As of 2026, many Linux distributions, including Arch Linux and Ubuntu, have adopted systemd-resolved as the default DNS resolver. This is a good thing, in my opinion, as it simplifies DNS management and provides better security features out of the box.