sysadmin

Verity Stob presents a humorous index for measuring the accumulation of 'cruft' on a PC, modeled after the Beaufort wind scale, describing stages of system degradation.

FSF sysadmins share how they block botnets and DDoS attacks using the reaction tool, an alternative to fail2ban that works with ipset to handle large volumes of malicious IP addresses.

The author argues for using memcached over Redis as a caching layer, highlighting its simplicity, ease of handling downtime, and straightforward clustering, contrasting with Redis's feature creep and tendency to be misused as a persistent database.

Systemd 261 is released with significant new features including the systemd-sysinstall OS installer, IMDSD for unified cloud metadata access, and storagectl for storage management.

A technical blog post explaining how to create persistent live USB images for Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu by injecting ext4 partitions and using OverlayFS, noting the lack of standardization between distributions. It covers kernel parameters, partition labels, and a hacky byte-swap trick to modify ISO boot parameters without rebuilding the image.

Legacy Labs, a retro-computing summer camp event, invites participants to explore old or permacomputing topics over two months, starting with a deep dive into Windows Server 2008 Core.

NMLinux is a free, open-source Linux adaptation of NETworkManager, providing a unified GUI for common network tools. Built with Python and PySide6, it includes modules for SSH, RDP, VNC, Wi-Fi, traceroute, speed test, and more, aimed at sysadmins and power users.

Sharing a $73.76 network optimization prompt that provides detailed guidance for an AI assistant to remotely diagnose and optimize home or enterprise network issues via SSH, emphasizing minimal interruption, layered troubleshooting, and quantifiable verification.

Introduces the the-book-of-secret-knowledge repository on GitHub, which collects a large number of CLI tools, cheatsheets, operations tips, and security resources, suitable for daily reference by engineers.

Peter N. M. Hansteen describes his transition to OpenSMTPD as OpenBSD 7.9 drops exim, arguing that OpenSMTPD is the mail server for the 21st century.

ModuleJail is a POSIX shell script that shrinks a Linux host's kernel-module attack surface by blacklisting every module not currently in use, helping sysadmins reduce risk from upcoming kernel module vulnerabilities.

A detailed guide and set of scripts for enabling Resizable BAR on an ASUS TUF RTX 3080 by flashing a modified VBIOS under Linux using nvflash, covering the process and recovery steps.

A developer evaluates Unison as a lightweight alternative to heavier sync utilities for self-hosted KeePass database synchronization, detailing configuration challenges and socket-mode setup.

A curated GitHub repository collecting inspiring lists, manuals, cheatsheets, blogs, hacks, one-liners, and CLI/web tools for system administrators, DevOps, pentesters, and security researchers.

This is a comprehensive open-source guide and toolkit for securing Linux servers, covering SSH hardening, firewall configuration, and intrusion detection using tools like Ansible, Fail2Ban, and Lynis.