The OOM killer is the least understood thing on a small VPS. It fires, kills your database instead of the runaway process, and the only trace is a line in…
Read MoreAnalyzing systemd-coredump Crash Dumps on a VPS: A Practical Debugging Workflow
When a service dies on a small VPS you usually get “status=11/SEGV” and nothing else. The crash dump that would tell you exactly which instruction faulted and on what address…
Read MoreAuditing Outbound Egress Rules with nftables and ufw to Catch Data Exfiltration
Most firewall reviews focus on inbound ports. That is backwards for a VPS threat model. An attacker who has already executed code does not need inbound access; they need outbound…
Read MoreDiagnosing Sustained Disk-Write Amplification on a VPS (and When to Add Monitoring)
A VPS that does nothing but still lights up its disk I/O counter is a common and frustrating problem. The writes are real, but the process responsible usually is not…
Read MorePreventing Silent Data Corruption with ZFS Checksums on a Low-RAM VPS
Silent data corruption is the failure nobody notices until a restore fails: a bit flips on a disk, the filesystem returns success, and your application reads plausible garbage for months….
Read MoreAuditing Cron Job Failures and Email Alerting on a Small VPS
Cron is the most common scheduler on a VPS and the easiest to forget. A typo in a path, an expired token, a full disk — and a backup or…
Read MoreTuning TCP Congestion Control on a High-Latency VPS: CUBIC vs BBR, Verified
On a WAN link with 100 ms or more of round-trip delay, a small VPS running the default CUBIC congestion control spends most of its time growing its window slowly…
Read MoreAuditing systemd Journal Disk Usage on a Small VPS: Measure, Cap and Verify
On a small VPS with a 20–40 GB disk, an unmanaged systemd journal is one of the most common causes of a surprise full filesystem. Unlike logrotate-driven text logs, the…
Read MoreCut VPS Boot Time to Under 10 Seconds: A systemd-analyze Workflow
A practical walkthrough of systemd-analyze blame and critical-chain: how to find the units that actually gate boot time and the fixes that cut it down.
Read MoreTuning Linux Kernel Entropy for High-Connection Servers
Why modern Linux CRNG rarely blocks in steady state, the boot-time stall that actually bites VMs, and how virtio-rng plus a persistent seed fixes it.
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