Short write-ups from the day-to-day running of a small network.
12 September 2026
A default route is a promise that you know where everything else lives. Most outages are that promise being wrong. Write the exceptions down, give each one a name, and keep the list short enough to read aloud.
When two services need the same port, decide which one owns it before adding a front end. A split that is documented is a design; a split that lives only in someone's memory is an incident waiting for a date.
3 August 2026
Copying files is the easy half. The useful half is a restore performed on a clean machine, by someone who did not create the backup. Time it, note what was missing, and fix the gaps while the failure is still imaginary.
Keep one copy offline and one copy off-site. A snapshot on the same disk is a version history, not a backup.
18 June 2026
Logs earn their disk space by answering questions. Keep timestamps in UTC, include the component name, and avoid recording secrets, tokens, or full request bodies. If a line would be awkward in an email, it does not belong in the log.
Rotation is part of the feature. An unrotated log is a scheduled outage with a vague date.