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

Proxy Caching: Serve Safe Stale Assets and Pages

Cache static assets and API answers at the proxy with stale-while-revalidate so a slow or broken upstream never becomes a slow user experience.

ProxiesMay 21, 20268 min read

Postfix as a Smarthost Relay to a Real ESP

Keep local sendmail and cron working, but hand the public hop to SES, Mailgun, or Postmark. Postfix sasl_passwd and smtp_tls are the whole design.

EmailMay 21, 20268 min read

SSH Reverse Tunnels to Expose a Local Service

Publish a laptop or lab port through a Lucknow VPS with ssh -R, bind it on localhost, and keep the tunnel alive without opening the lab to the internet.

Linux AdministrationMay 21, 20268 min read

Host Private LLM Inference on a Single VPS

Bind a local 7B to loopback, cap RAM and threads with systemd, and let only your app call it so private prompts never leave a Lucknow VPS host.

AI InfrastructureMay 21, 20268 min read

SQLite Indexes and Why LIKE %x Will Not Use Them

SQLite B-tree indexes match left-most prefixes, so LIKE with a leading percent cannot seek; use suffix indexes, FTS, or a stored reverse column.

DatabasesMay 20, 20268 min read

HTTP-01 vs DNS-01: Choosing an ACME Challenge

Compare HTTP-01 and DNS-01 ACME challenges, pick the one that fits nginx on a VPS versus wildcards, and avoid the common failure modes of each.

DNS & TLSMay 20, 20268 min read

RAG Ingest Pipeline: Git Pull, Embed, Upsert

Pull a docs repo, chunk the diff, embed new blobs, and upsert by path so your local VPS RAG index tracks git instead of a full nightly rebuild.

AI InfrastructureMay 20, 20269 min read

cron vs systemd Timers: Scheduling Jobs on Modern Linux

Compare classic cron with systemd timers for scheduling recurring jobs, and learn when each fits better.

LinuxMay 19, 20266 min read

NixOS Servers: Reproducible Declarative Configuration in Nix

NixOS rebuilds a whole server from one declarative file: packages, services, users, and firewall in code, with rollbacks that make changes boring.

LinuxMay 19, 20268 min read

Self-Hosted Analytics With Umami: Privacy-First

Replace Google Analytics with Umami, a cookieless self-hosted analytics tool with a Postgres backend, real-time dashboards, and no consent banners.

Self-HostingMay 19, 20266 min read

Infrastructure as Code: Declarative, Testable, Reviewable

Apply the four IaC principles — declarative, version-controlled, reviewable, testable — to stop infrastructure drift and sketchy manual changes.

API & AutomationMay 19, 20267 min read

Context Length vs RAM vs Tokens per Second

See how context length grows KV cache RAM and slows prompt eval on a CPU VPS so you can pick 2k, 4k, or 8k windows without an OOM on 8 GB RAM.

AI InfrastructureMay 19, 20268 min read