NetBay journal

Guides for operators

Practical guides for Linux, containers, CI/CD, self-hosting, and running VPS infrastructure from Netbay Engineering.

499 articles · 24 topics

Choose between ephemeral per-PR previews and a long-lived staging environment for realistic integration testing.

Draw a hard line: the request path returns quickly, workers own slow I/O, and mixing them in one process is how p95 and retries both fail too.

How to measure your real attack surface, what a minimal install removes, and where minimalism costs you at 3 a.m. when debugging tools are missing.

Prove last night dump is restorable: check age, size, archive headers, and a throwaway restore so backup success is a test, not a file timestamp.

Understand when bash sources .bashrc, .profile, and related files so your environment persists across logins.

Pass database passwords and API keys to containers without baking them into images, exposing them in inspect, or committing them to the repository.

Your dev environment belongs in version control. A devcontainer.json plus GitHub Codespaces reproduces the exact setup on any machine in minutes.

Diagnose and resolve port collisions between self-hosted containers and host services with a few targeted commands and smarter compose design.

Enforce IP allowlists, rate limits, and method filters at the proxy so unwanted hostile requests are rejected before they reach your application.

Run several containerized services on one VPS with Compose, Podman Quadlets, and a reverse proxy — no cluster, no wasted capacity.

Compare Joplin Server and Outline for self-hosted notes, then deploy one with Docker Compose to sync your Markdown notes across every device.

Keep passwords and API keys out of git with Ansible Vault, sensitive Terraform variables, and rotation habits that work with real systems.