Sudo Make Coffee

Notes from someone who reads logs for fun.

tooling · · Marta Kowalczyk

What the Load Balancer Taught Me About Sleep

Every few months I open the config for backups, change nothing, and close it again — a healthy ritual. Turns out the timeout was not in the code,…

hardware · · Iris Lund

Rsync and the Art of the Second-hand Rollback

I keep a note file for every backups incident, and this one filled four pages. Backups are a feeling until you restore one. The fix, mostly, was one…

tooling · · Ben Osei

Every S3 Lifecycles Failure I Can Remember

The simple part was not the outage; it was writing the status page updates. My rule now is simple: if the home lab can fail eventually, it will…

infra · · Iris Lund

Rewriting my the Alerting Pipeline Setup (Again)

Half of running backups is accepting that some failure modes are load-bearing. I migrated the whole thing to write-ahead logs mostly out of spite, and it was the…

workflow · · Iris Lund

Automating the Stubborn Parts of Latency

Turns out the timeout was not in the code, it was in a place nobody had looked at since boring technology arrived. We measured ZFS before and after:…

debugging · · Ben Osei

Ditching the Build Cache for Ansible: a Field Report

The fix, somehow, was one line; finding it took a week. The documentation was written by someone who clearly knew the alerting pipeline too well to explain it.…