DevOps
Docker & Portainer, Traefik, Cloudflare tunnels, a ~140-container NAS homelab, backups and monitoring — my most hands-on, differentiated material.
12 posts in this category
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When Your Database Client Lies to You: Patching Workbench 26 for MariaDB
MySQL Workbench 26.7.0 connects to MySQL 8.4 but fails on MariaDB with a useless TypeError. Three patches, and why version numbers stopped meaning what you think.
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Replacing RDPGuard With IPBan: The Traps Nobody Documents
I migrated from paid RDPGuard 7.8.7 to open-source IPBan 4.1.0 — and hit three undocumented traps, including an uninstaller that would have silently unbanned 12 attackers.
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Upgrading n8n v1 to v2: Seven Deprecations in One Log File
My self-hosted n8n 1.x to 2.40.1 upgrade surfaced seven silent breakages at once — a telemetry schema rejection, deprecated webhook vars, and a DB override that quietly disabled the AI sandbox.
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The Corruption Came Back on Different Drives — the Cause Was TRIM, Not the SSDs
Two weeks after a btrfs RAID1 pool corrupted on healthy-looking NVMe drives, the same all-zero checksum reappeared on a different drive stack. The culprit was queued TRIM (NCQ) on Seagate IronWolf 110 SSDs — a firmware bug FreeBSD blacklisted but Linux never did. How I caught it and the fix.
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I Was About to RMA This SSD — the Fault Was a SATA Cable
A Seagate IronWolf 110 SSD threw WRITE FPDMA timeouts, failed mkfs with 'superblock magic doesn't match', and went silent — a textbook dying drive. I swapped one SATA cable and it formatted clean with zero errors. How to test before condemning a drive.
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When SMART Says Healthy and Your RAID Is Silently Corrupting Data
A btrfs RAID1 pool on two healthy-looking NVMe drives quietly corrupted a Windows VM. How I caught it with a checksum forensic — and why the root cause (M.2 riser link fault vs batch defect) is still uncertain, with both drives now testing clean.
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Why Unraid Hangs When You Stop the Array With a Swapfile — and the Fix
My Unraid array stop hung forever at unmounting disks because an 8 GB btrfs swapfile pinned /mnt/cache. Root cause, the /boot/config/stop trap, and two User Scripts that fix it.
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Passbolt UI Kept Hanging — Three Failure Modes From One Missing Config File
My self-hosted Passbolt returned 504s for weeks: a null GPG fingerprint stalled email delivery, a container recreate wiped the fix, and ssl.force behind a proxy caused a redirect loop.
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Hardening a Tor Onion Service: What Actually Matters
Out of curiosity I mirrored my portfolio and git server onto the darknet. Here's the hardening that held, the parts that silently broke, and whether it's worth offering to clients.
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Automating CyberPanel Without the UI: Reverse-Engineering an Undocumented v2 API
CyberPanel v2 killed the documented JSON API and left only the Angular UI's own session+CSRF endpoints. Here's the exact auth flow and how I found the real functions behind the pages.
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Authentik 2025.8 to 2026.8: The Breakable Parts Nobody Warns You About
A year's worth of authentik major-version upgrade pain: storage mount changes, RBAC session cleanup, trusted proxies, and the authorization_flow vs authentication_flow mix-up that broke SSO.
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Why Telegram Bot Notifications Die: IPv6, DNS, and a 400 That Took a Day
A debugging story: a Dockerized telegram monitor whose sendPhoto calls returned 400 from nginx/1.30.1 while getMe worked fine — an IPv6-only DNS answer, a wrong extra_hosts IP, and a multipart join that corrupted JPEG bytes.
