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personal notebookA working notebook for systems, networks and free software
This is the personal workshop of zecrazytux: a systems and network engineer who likes free software, small hardware and taking broken things apart until they behave.
Around here you will find field notes rather than polished articles. Each note records a problem, the trail that led to it and the fix that finally worked. Some entries are short command reminders. Others are long debugging stories. All of them are meant to be read on a terminal and copied without fuss.
What lives in the notebook
Notes are grouped the way they were written: by the kind of work involved, not by a marketing plan.
Crashes, core dumps and the slow unravelling of a production fault.
Open the trail → SysadminServers and networksNetBSD, Debian, mail, routing and virtualisation at a human scale.
Open the trail → DevelopmentTool notesShort guides for the debugger, the version control system and friends.
Open the trail → HardwareSmall machinesSolder, screwdriver and a quiet little board earning its keep.
Open the trail →Notes people come back for
From a random crash to a null pointer behind a reverse proxy.
Read the note → TroubleshootingPHP dies with a bus errorConcurrent writes, a cache file and a fix built on one atomic rename.
Read the note → NetBSDA home ADSL routerA Soekris box, a PCI ADSL card and a stubborn configuration quirk.
Read the note → HardwareTwo disks, one power leadFeeding a small RAID array from a single connector on an ARM board.
Read the note →The toolbox behind the notes
No endorsements and no sponsorships, just the things that are actually plugged in while the notes get written.
- NetBSD on amd64 and on small ARM boards
- Debian on servers and on the desk
- pkgsrc for packages that are not in the base system
- PPPoE on the edge and PF for filtering
- NetFlow collectors for seeing what a link is really doing
- IPv6 curiosity and old fashioned tcpdump
- Perl for glue and quick tools
- The GNU debugger for when glue is not enough
- Git for keeping the history honest
- Xen guests and the PVGrub bootloader
- Ganeti for running a small cluster
- Configuration management with Ansible
How to reach me
Corrections are welcome and often make the notes better. The fastest routes are mail and IRC.
- Mail:
zecrazytux at zecrazytux dot net - IRC:
zecrazytuxon the netbsdfr channel
This page keeps all of its links inside the notebook on purpose.