Explore the world of Linux with clear, approachable guides. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to sharpen your skills, you’ll find something to brew your interest here.
As someone who’s run a homelab for years, I’ve learned that managing disk space is key to keeping my servers running smoothly. One of the most effective ways to keep disk usage under control is by using btrfs snapshots. I’ve seen this go wrong when people don’t have a solid backup strategy, and btrfs snapshots have been a lifesaver for me. The real trick is to use them in conjunction with a solid backup plan.
[Read More]I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of replacing my desktop’s taskbar with a custom terminal layout. After months of tweaking and fine-tuning with tmux, I’ve finally settled on a setup that works perfectly for my daily workflow. The real trick is finding a configuration that suits your needs, and I’ve learned that it’s all about experimentation.
For those new to tmux, it’s a terminal multiplexer that allows you to create multiple virtual terminals within a single window. This means you can have multiple shells, each with its own set of commands and output, all within a single window. I’ve seen this go wrong when people don’t take the time to understand how tmux works, so it’s worth reading up on the official tmux documentation before diving in.
[Read More]I’ve been using Linux for years, and I’ve had my fair share of boot issues. Recently, I encountered a frustrating problem where my system would hang during boot, and I had no idea what was causing it. After some digging, I discovered that the issue lay with my initramfs configuration. In this article, I’ll walk you through how I used Dracut debugging to identify and solve the issue.
[Read More]I’ve been using Linux for years, and I’ve found that my terminal workflow is crucial to my productivity. One tool that has significantly improved my workflow is tmux, a terminal multiplexer that allows me to manage multiple terminal sessions from a single window. I’ve seen this go wrong when people don’t take the time to customize tmux - it can be overwhelming at first, but trust me, it’s worth it. In this article, I’ll share my experience with customizing tmux to create a more efficient and productive terminal workflow.
[Read More]I’ve seen this go wrong when a resource-intensive job is running in the background - it can consume significant CPU, memory, or I/O resources, slowing down other system activities. To mitigate this, Linux provides two essential tools: nice and ionice. In this article, we’ll explore how to use these tools to tame resource-intensive background jobs and maintain a smooth system experience.
The nice command is used to adjust the scheduling priority of a process. By default, Linux assigns a nice value of 0 to each process, which means it has a normal scheduling priority. You can adjust this value using the nice command, with values ranging from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest priority). For example:
I’ve seen this go wrong when you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue and journalctl spits out a wall of text. By default, it displays all available log messages, which can be overwhelming, especially on systems with many services running. The output includes the timestamp, hostname, syslog identifier, and the actual log message. To make sense of this output, you can use various options and filters provided by journalctl.
I’ve always been curious about how my Linux system resolves domain names. Recently, I’ve been dealing with some DNS resolution issues at home, which led me to dig into systemd-resolved. As it turns out, many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora, use systemd-resolved as their DNS resolver by default. In this article, I’ll share my experience with getting reliable DNS resolution at home using systemd-resolved.
systemd-resolved is part of the systemd suite and provides a DNS resolver service. It’s designed to be a caching, validating, and recursive DNS resolver - which means it can cache DNS responses, validate DNSSEC records, and perform recursive DNS lookups. To check if systemd-resolved is running on your system, you can use the following command:
I’ve been self-hosting various services at home for a while now, and one thing that’s always been a pain point is managing SSL certificates. With multiple services running on different machines, each requiring its own certificate, it’s easy to lose track of which ones are due for renewal. I’ve seen this go wrong when a certificate expires unexpectedly, taking down a service with it. To avoid this, I’ve implemented a centralized certificate management system, which I’ll outline in this article.
[Read More]I’ve spent years working in the terminal, and my command history has grown out of control. It’s frustrating when you need to recall a specific command, but it’s buried deep in your history. I’ve seen this go wrong when trying to debug an issue or repeat a complex process. Recently, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a custom Bash setup to organize my command line history.
[Read More]I’ve learned the hard way that managing log files is crucial to keeping my small home server running smoothly. Log noise, in particular, can be a real pain - it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. In this article, I’ll share how I use journalctl and logrotate to tame log noise and keep my system healthy.
Log noise refers to the overwhelming amount of log data generated by various system components. This noise makes it tough to spot critical errors or security issues. In a small home server setup, log noise can lead to disk space issues, slow down performance, and make troubleshooting a nightmare. I’ve seen this go wrong when I neglected to monitor my log files, and it wasn’t pretty.
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