/blog

Managing AWS Lambda functions with Terraform: a small reusable module, automatic IAM, and a CI/CD-friendly layout. With a working GitHub example.

A practical tour of grep — flags I actually use, regex patterns that pay off, and log-analysis recipes.

A 3-node Kafka cluster on Ubuntu without ZooKeeper — using KRaft, the modern self-managed metadata protocol.

What Ansible is, how to install it, and a tour of the bits that matter — inventories, playbooks, roles, templates — with a real Nginx example.

A tour of the directories under / on a Linux system — what each one is for and which ones you'll actually touch.

Reading the rwx output of ls -l, chmod's symbolic and numeric modes, and the patterns you'll actually use.

A modern, opinionated tour of the Linux networking CLI — ip, ss, mtr, tcpdump and friends — with the patterns I run on every box.

Setting up the zsh + oh-my-zsh + powerlevel10k stack I've been using for years. Plugins, fonts, and the bits of the prompt that are actually useful.

Self-hosting the free Community Edition of GitLab — version control, code review, and CI/CD on a box you control.

Standing up a 3-node MongoDB replica set for high availability and read scale-out — config, initiate, and verification.

Adding MongoDB's apt repo, installing the server, and getting a single-node MongoDB up and running on Ubuntu.

A step-by-step Cassandra 4.1 cluster across 3 Ubuntu 22.04 nodes — install, gossip config, replication test.

Anatomy of a systemd unit file — Unit, Service, and Install — and the steps to ship your own service.

Standing up a 4-node highly-available PostgreSQL cluster with Patroni, etcd and HAProxy.

Two reliable ways to see which ports are in use on a Linux box and which process is on each — lsof and ss.

Standing up Pritunl on Ubuntu — an open-source OpenVPN-based server with built-in 2FA, Let's Encrypt and a clean web UI.

userdel is the small, focused command for removing a user account on Ubuntu or any other Linux distro. Two flags cover almost every case.

A short intro to Terraform — what it is, where it fits in the Infrastructure-as-Code story, and how to install it on Ubuntu and macOS.

Using certbot to get a free Let's Encrypt SSL cert for an Nginx site, with auto-renewal that just works.

How to list, inspect, and check the status of services on a systemd-based Linux box.

Bringing up a fresh Ubuntu or Debian box almost always starts with managing users. A quick walk through useradd, adduser and deluser.

Chaining commands with &, ;, &&, ||, and friends — the operators you'll reach for the most when stitching shell pipelines together.

Standing up a Network File System (NFS) share on Ubuntu and mounting it from a client — the minimal walkthrough.

SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) is the simplest way to move files between machines over SSH. A quick reference for the patterns I use.

Installing Jenkins, the long-time CI/CD workhorse, on Ubuntu — Java, the apt repo, the firewall rule, and the first-run setup.

A walkthrough of installing Pardus 21.0 — Türkiye's TÜBİTAK-developed Linux distro — step by step with screenshots.

Setting up Node.js with nvm so you can run multiple versions side-by-side, plus Yarn from the official apt repo.

dig is the go-to CLI for poking around DNS records and debugging DNS issues. A quick tour of the flags I actually use.

Three different ways to pull CPU details on a Linux box — /proc/cpuinfo, dmidecode, and lshw.

Two quick ways to read RAM and DIMM-slot info on a Linux box without opening the chassis — dmidecode and lshw.

Moving sshd off port 22 is one of the first things people do to harden a Linux box. Here's the two-step version.

Portainer is the GUI I keep coming back to for managing Docker and Docker Swarm. Setting it up and a tour of the menus that matter.

Adding the official PostgreSQL apt repo, installing 12, and the minimum config tweaks (pg_hba, listen_addresses) to take connections.

Standing up a free-tier AWS EC2 instance and installing the full LAMP stack to host WordPress, end to end.

Standing up a 2-node Kubernetes cluster from scratch using kubeadm, containerd and Calico — step by step.