NetBay journal

Guides for operators

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

599 articles · 24 topics

Have systemd hold your ports open: start listeners instantly, spawn services on first connection, and drop privileges without touching the socket.

A restore drill you run to a clean directory, against a real copy, catches corruption and missing dependencies before production depends on them.

Use ss to inspect sockets and connections and ethtool to read NIC statistics for diagnosing Linux server networking problems.

Put token buckets and nginx limit_req in front of a local CPU inference API so one client cannot OOM the box or stall every other RAG query.

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.