Tag: Linux

1. Unattended Upgrades: Automating Security Updates

   Jul 21, 2025

   Unpatched servers are the most common entry point for attackers, but fully automatic updates without oversight carry their own risk. This article shows how unattended-upgrades reliably applies security patches, reports failures by email, and moves reboots into a plannable maintenance window instead of interrupting operations unpredictably.

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2. Symlinks vs. Hardlinks: Differences and Use Cases

   Jul 17, 2025

   Symlinks and hardlinks appear to solve the same problem, but they operate on entirely different levels of the filesystem. Understanding the difference at the inode level helps you avoid broken references, build reliable atomic deployments, and save significant disk space with rsync backups without risking data integrity.

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3. Filesystem Quotas Setup: Limiting Storage per User and Group

   Jul 11, 2025

   A single user or service consuming storage without limits can bring down an entire server. Filesystem quotas limit storage and file count per user or group, with soft limits as an early warning and hard limits as a hard stop.

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4. Linux Server Distributions Compared

   Jul 8, 2025

   The choice of server distribution directly determines how current PHP packages are, how long security updates keep flowing, and how smoothly operations run with your hosting provider. This article compares Ubuntu LTS, Debian, and Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux along real operational criteria for PHP and Magento servers, instead of catering to distro preference.

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5. Planning a Kernel Version Upgrade: LTS, Rollback and Compatibility

   Jul 4, 2025

   A kernel version upgrade without a plan can take down a production server if drivers go missing or DKMS modules stop building. With a clear baseline snapshot, an LTS strategy, GRUB as a rollback safety net and a test plan, the risk turns into a controlled, repeatable procedure.

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6. Mosh for Unstable Connections: The Robust SSH Alternative

   Jul 2, 2025

   Working on the move on a train, in a café, or with switching WiFi regularly pushes classic SSH to its limits: every IP change or brief interruption ends the connection. Mosh solves exactly this problem with a UDP based protocol that transparently survives connection drops and network changes, while local echo makes it feel noticeably more responsive than SSH.

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7. Choosing a Disk I/O Scheduler for Database Servers

   Jul 1, 2025

   The disk I/O scheduler on Linux decides in what order read and write requests get passed to the block device, long before MySQL itself notices anything. On NVMe storage, the wrong choice can cost more latency than any MySQL configuration change could ever save.

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8. Tracking Down Mysterious CPU Usage

   Jun 24, 2025

   A single process permanently consumes 100 percent CPU, but nobody knows why, there was no deploy and no configuration change. This article walks through the complete diagnostic path for mysterious CPU usage: from the first suspicion in top, through thread analysis and syscall tracing with strace, to the exact code path with perf.

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9. tmux and Screen in Daily Use: Terminal Sessions Without Connection Loss

   Jun 21, 2025

   Anyone who starts long running processes on a remote server while relying on a plain SSH terminal risks losing all progress the moment the connection drops. tmux and GNU Screen solve this by decoupling sessions from the actual terminal and keeping them running in the background, whether the connection wobbles or the laptop lid closes.

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10. Understanding Linux Processes: PID, PPID, Process Tree

    Jun 19, 2025

    Every Linux process carries a unique PID and points to its parent via its PPID, which naturally forms a traceable tree of parent and child processes. This article shows how to read that tree with ps and pstree, why orphaned processes get reparented to PID 1, and how to track down and terminate a hung PHP-FPM worker in practice.

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