🔍 The Strange Write Load While investigating unexpectedly high SSD wear on a Proxmox cluster, I found something surprising: several otherwise quiet Debian VMs were writing tens of gigabytes per day. The pattern was suspiciously regular. VMs checked every two minutes were writing around 65–67 GiB per day. Systems checked every five minutes were closer … Read more
We have published a small Docker-based setup for running an aptly Debian package repository. The goal is simple: provide a compact, reproducible way to host signed Debian packages without turning the setup itself into a science project. ✨ What it does docker-aptly runs aptly inside a Debian Trixie based container and serves the published repository … Read more
Version 1.3.0 of remote-systemd-toggle is now available. This release combines the security hardening and packaging improvements from 1.2.0 with a small CLI cleanup in 1.3.0. There is one small breaking CLI change: use remote-systemd-toggle status instead of remote-systemd-toggle –status. The protocol, configuration files, secrets file format, certificates, and packages remain compatible. 🔐 Security hardening The … Read more
🧱 Built Step by Step The last public update on QuorumBD was published several months ago. In an early-stage project, such a gap can easily create the impression that development has stalled or that the project has been abandoned. That is not the case. QuorumBD is still on our workbench. However, a project like QuorumBD … Read more
remote-systemd-toggle 1.1.0 is now available. This release focuses on two areas: better operational hardening with fail2ban support and a significantly improved README with clearer documentation, configuration examples, security notes, and tradeoffs. 🛡️ fail2ban Support Version 1.1.0 adds log output intended for fail2ban integration. The main goal is to help protect the server against repeated connection … Read more
We are happy to announce that remote-systemd-toggle 1.0.0 is now available. This is the first public release of the project and provides a small, focused Go client/server tool for securely toggling a predefined systemd service over the network. 🔐 Secure Remote Service Control remote-systemd-toggle uses TLS 1.3, mutual TLS authentication, an additional password check, and … Read more
Sometimes the simplest tools are the most useful ones. While managing servers, VPN gateways, lab systems, and infrastructure, we occasionally found ourselves wanting a very small utility that could securely toggle a specific systemd service from a remote machine. Not a complete orchestration platform. Not a web application. Not another management framework. Just a small, … Read more
Designing Backpressure and Concurrency in QuorumBD Middleware Building a distributed block storage system requires careful attention not only to replication and consistency, but also to the behaviour of the middleware layer that connects clients to the storage core. In QuorumBD, the middleware is intentionally designed to remain lightweight and deterministic, acting as a reliable bridge … Read more
Thirty-Five Years in the Machine — and Why I Left 🏭 Inside the Machine I have been inside the machine for thirty-five years. Not on the periphery. Not as an observer. Inside — where decisions are made that shape products used by billions, where projects worth hundreds of millions live and die in conference rooms, … Read more
🚀 retentions 1.3: Smarter Retention, Fewer Surprises With retentions 1.3, the tool grows up another notch. The core idea hasn’t changed:explicit, deterministic retention rules for plain files — no magic, no guessing. But version 1.3 adds a few very practical features that solve real-world annoyances many backup setups quietly suffer from. 🧰 What’s New in … Read more
