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A chat-ops bot is a doorway, not a convenience
My infrastructure chat bot went silent for six hours because the router had blocked the messaging API's one IP. That and a self-heal webhook wired to nothing taught me how to build and test a privileged chat-ops bot.
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On single-node Kubernetes, RollingUpdate can mount your database twice
With one replica, RollingUpdate starts the new pod before stopping the old, and on a single node both mount the same ReadWriteOnce volume. How I audited 123 Deployments, fixed 15 with zero downtime, and what really slowed Qdrant.
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Pi-hole blocked my own analytics, and other DNS filter surprises
I thought Google Analytics had banned me: my own Pi-hole was answering 0.0.0.0 for four Google domains. Three surprises from running a DNS filter for the whole LAN, and how to test around it.
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Prometheus WAL on a RAM disk: the trade-offs, and my empty tmpfs
My Prometheus config said the WAL lived on a RAM disk. The tmpfs held 0 bytes; the 785 MB WAL was on the SSD all along. Why, whether it was ever a good idea, and where RAM disks do help.
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A 20-second power cut, an 8-hour outage: LUKS on a home server
My server lost power at 00:31, came back by itself, then waited 8 h 25 min at a hidden LUKS passphrase prompt. How to prove it from systemd timestamps, triage the cold-boot alert storm, and choose an unattended unlock.
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An AI studio that makes films and 3D prints in Blender
My AI agents build printable models and short films in a sandboxed Blender over a tool protocol. The hard part is that a text-only model cannot see its own output, so it ships broken geometry as 'watertight' unless you give it sight.
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The test that deleted my home folder
To prove a path-traversal bug existed, an AI coding assistant ran the test against the unfixed code on the host, and the bug deleted everything my user could delete in ten seconds. How I found the exact command on the raw disk, and the boring safeguards that now prevent it.
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Passwords that only fail after a reboot
Long-lived connections and hard-coded default passwords hid a database password rotation until a routine reboot broke two services. Why it happens, how to find the services that are hiding it, and a fail-closed checklist.
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Every attack here makes others safer
A honeypot, behavioural detection, blocking at the edge and a community that shares every verdict: how one machine near Iași turns attacks into protection for strangers.