just me and linux — page 2

Counters tell you that something is wrong. tcpdump tells you what happened. Most engineers can start a capture. Far fewer can look at forty lines of output and say "

"We're seeing packet loss." That sentence starts more wasted investigations than any other in infrastructure. It's not a diagnosis. It's a feeling.

You have nginx running. Someone says it's broken. You need to know, in the next thirty seconds: who is connected, from where, to which port, and whether anything

Most engineers learn Linux networking backwards. They memorise commands first, then spend years never quite knowing which one to reach for. So they run netstat -an, stare at 4000 lines,

Somebody says "the app can't reach the database." You have a terminal and no idea where to start. This post is the on-ramp. Vocabulary, then

Worker processes, worker_connections, file descriptors, and the two kernel queues in front of them - plus the order to check things in when someone says nginx is slow.

Most self-hosted deployment tools replace one form of complexity with another. You trade cloud bills for YAML sprawl, Dockerfiles, pipeline configs, and a weekend of docs hunting. Openship is

DocuSign charges $40/month. DocuSeal gives you the same core workflow in a Docker container that costs you nothing.

Mozilla killed Pocket. Your browser bookmarks are a graveyard. Karakeep is a self-hosted bookmark manager with AI tagging, full-page archiving, and video hoarding — and it runs entirely on your own hardware.

Google killed Google Trips. TripIt wants your credit card. And shared Google Sheets "trip planners" are just organized suffering. If you've been self-hosting everything else

Project N.O.M.A.D.: Offline Knowledge That Actually Works Your internet goes down. Your cell tower fails. Your cloud services vanish. You still need answers. What It Is

Unsloth: Local AI Training Gets a Web UI That Actually Works Most local AI tools make you choose: either get a slick interface that phones home to some API, or