#sysadminlife

Several requests this morning. The first one: "I broke a configuration and you need to rush and fix it, because this could cause some inconvenience to one of our employees". My reply: "I can take care of it early this afternoon as it’s not really urgent and I'm busy at the moment." "It’s not urgent, but you need to do it now because this afternoon I won’t have time to deal with it". Latest phone call, ten minutes ago: "Hi, sorry, when you get a chance, could you fix this thing for me? It’s not urgent, just let me know when it’s done". Guess which one is already fixed? #IT #SysAdminLife

This is funny, because Google is known to be very rigorous with self hosted mail servers that are often blocked or rejected for, at times, weird reasons. I would expect them to be able to shut down the spammers that use their infrastructure :) #SysAdminLife #MailAdmin #Selfhost @homelab@fedigroups.social

Mail server stats: 299 connection requests from IP addresses in the bc.googleusercontent.com range in the past 72 hours, 100% of them trying to dump spam/phishing mails, claiming to be from microsoft.com, ubuntu.com, GitHub.com and many more. Google should take note (but it will ignore this, as it has always done). #SysAdminLife #MailAdmin #Selfhost @homelab@fedigroups.social

When you've done 17 hours of work, part of which consisting of two outages and it's only Monday. #sysadmin #sysadminlife

Random tip. On a rpm based Linux system like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky, Fedora etc, you can find the rpm package that installed a certain file/binary with rpm -qf /path/to/file. This is an ancient way of doing that, but really fast, as it uses local info from the rpmdb :). I just used it to find out that the /usr/sbin/ether-wake command that I use to switch my homelab machines on via wake-on-LAN (WoL) magic packets lives in the net-tools rpm :)

#SysAdminLife @homelab@fedigroups.social

It's funny when someone downloads a 3 GB ISO file, and calls it "live CD". 😄 #HomeLab #SysAdminLife @homelab@fedigroups.social

This is one of the best ideas I have ever had. #SysadminLife #organization #technology

The moment you begin using any of the many vibe-coded software projects that are popping up everywhere, you inherit its technical debt and future maintenance. #sysadminlife #sloperator #homelab

Friday is update time for my homelab and public servers. Because, should something fail, I have the weekend to fix it. But, as always, nothing failed. All 9 RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) servers got their dnf update, followed by a reboot. This time the security updates included important nginx fixes, moderate coreutils stuff. Also a emu-kvm bugfix. All is good, machines and services are up and running again. 20 minutes of well invested time. Coffee next :)

#SysAdminLife #Homelab @homelab@fedigroups.social

Testing https://dynip.dev a new dynamic IP service from Sweden with RFC2136 TSIG, DNSSEC, IPv6 etc. Looking good so far. I already created a zone for one of my domains and will now see if I can use this for my homelab to expose public services. #SelfHost #SysAdminLife #ddns @homelab@fedigroups.social

Just to keep stuff correct. Copyfail and DirtyFrag CVEs are fixed in almost all Linux distribution kernels. As far as I can see there was no widespread damage. The nginx CVE needs a non-default config to be exploitable. So update your machines and relax. And dear tech journalists — please do a bit more work to put things in context instead of shouting FIRE from the rooftops whenever you see smoke. It could also be a hot pile of sh*t that causes that smoke ;) #SelfHost #SysAdminLife @homelab@fedigroups.social

Friday is dnf update and reboot day for the machines in my homelab and the servers I run on the internet. My machines all run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so I know I am protected against any new threat that comes with a lot of media fanfare, because we at Red Hat stoically fix things and make the updates available. So as on every Friday, I can relax and enjoy the weekend :)

#SelfHost #SysAdminLife @homelab@fedigroups.social

Age verification for the services I run? Solved. I look in my passport, verify that I am 18 years or older, look in the mirror to check that it is really me and after that I install Yet Another Service on my server to become less dependent on big tech :) #SelfHost #SysAdminLife #SarcasmButOnlyHalf