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
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
26
May
The Virtual OS Museum: A Time Machine Made of Bootloaders, Dust, and Bad Fonts
A nostalgic dive into the Virtual OS Museum, where DOS prompts still blink, GEM still feels futuristic, Linux still smells faintly of 1997, and every boot menu is a trapdoor into another strange, brilliant future we almost got.
23
May
Linux Snippets #7: The Immutable Flag
Tired of NetworkManager or systemd overwriting your custom configuration files? Here is the single kernel-level command to lock a file down so hard that not even the root user can modify it.