Somewhere inside the firewall, your packet entered a chain, followed three jumps, and was quietly sentenced to death by a rule written during an emergency in 2022. nft monitor trace lets you follow one carefully selected packet through the bureaucracy and discover exactly where policy became homicide.
2026
14
Sep
NginXplorer: Because Spinning Up a 2GB Grafana Stack Just to Watch Nginx Logs is Madness
It usually starts with an innocent thought on a Friday evening. You’re logged into a low-powered VPS or your homelab machine, and you notice your blog is feeling a bit sluggish. Or maybe you noticed a suspicious spike in inbound network bandwidth and you just want to know: Who is hammering my web server right now, […]
13
Sep
Linux Snippets #13: Ask the Machine What Killed It
After a reboot, every Linux server develops temporary amnesia and insists that everything is running perfectly. Fortunately, the journal may remember the OOM killer, dying disk, or panicking service from five minutes earlier. Here is how to question the previous boot before log rotation provides it with legal representation.
11
Sep
Linux Snippets #12: tcpdump Without Capturing the Entire Internet
Capture everything and inspect it later’ sounds reassuringly forensic until the PCAP consumes the disk, records half the office, and still buries the failed handshake beneath six million irrelevant packets. Here is how to make tcpdump answer one question at a time – with limits established before optimism becomes an incident.
08
Sep
Linux Snippets #11: Run It Once, Contain It, Forget It
Some jobs are too important for nohup, yet far too temporary to deserve permanent accommodation in /etc/systemd/system. Here is how to use systemd-run to give a one-off command strict resource limits, logging, and supervision—and then make the evidence disappear.
06
Sep
Linux Snippets #10: Punching Through Firewalls with Reverse SSH
Trapped behind CGNAT, Starlink, or a strict corporate firewall? Here is how to use a reverse SSH tunnel to force a headless machine to ‘phone home’ and grant you remote access without touching a router
27
Aug
Tachyon: How Forking an Abandoned Webmail Client Escalated Rather Quickly
What started as “I’ll just fork SnappyMail” somehow turned into a full-blown webmail project with modern PHP, CalDAV, better search, undo-send, tighter security and a rapidly growing user base. Tachyon is what happens when software archaeology, self-hosting and poor estimates of project scope collide.
04
Aug
Linux Snippets #9: The Ephemeral Workspace (tmpfs)
Working with highly sensitive plaintext files or trying to stop your Raspberry Pi from burning through SD cards? Here is how to carve out a chunk of your system RAM and mount it as a physical, completely volatile hard drive.
30
Jul
Linux Snippets #8: Saving a Doomed SSH Session
Forgot to start tmux before running a massive database dump over SSH? Here is how to use native Unix job control to detach a running process so it survives when you close your laptop
13
Jul
Your Repository Has Left the Building: Why You should never trust Grok Build
xAI’s Grok Build CLI was caught uploading complete Git repositories—including files the agent was forbidden to read and the repository’s commit history. Apparently, “do not open this file” and “please package it for cloud storage” are entirely different instructions.