Notes on code, games, and the stuff in between.
A cron job re-ran a side effect every two minutes because its "done" marker was gated on a flaky downstream step. The fix is one line moved up. Here's the pattern.
A Plesk-managed Let's Encrypt cert expired and took the site down. The fix wasn't renewing it in Plesk — it was moving the domain to standalone certbot. Two gotchas included.
Honest comparison of Prometheus+Grafana, Netdata and Uptime Kuma — what each one is good at, what it costs you, and why running all three is a reasonable answer.
Move a Hytale server from a bare systemd unit into Docker behind a web panel — container layout, UDP ports, console access, and keeping systemd as a fallback.
Tail a game server log, match crash and freeze patterns, ping a Discord webhook. Includes the noise-control rules that stop it becoming a channel nobody reads.
Scrape node_exporter across a WireGuard tunnel so no metrics port is public — plus the pps/bps alert that tells you a DDoS from a player spike.
How to route ports 80/443 to one container and 3389/game ports to another VM behind a single public IP on Proxmox — DNAT rules, hairpin, and making it survive a reboot.
Docker vs Podman compared — daemon vs daemonless, rootless security, systemd/Quadlet integration, compose support, and when switching is actually worth it.
Run Coolify as your own Heroku — install, deploy apps and docker-compose services, automatic HTTPS, plus the API, sslip testing and path-routing cheats.
Tailscale vs WireGuard compared — Tailscale is built on WireGuard but adds NAT traversal, MagicDNS, ACLs and zero-config mesh. When to pick raw WireGuard instead.
Set up CrowdSec on Linux as a fail2ban alternative — the agent/bouncer split, parsing logs, the firewall bouncer, community blocklists, and honest trade-offs.
Coolify vs Dokploy vs CapRover compared — architecture, proxy, git deploys, multi-server, and which self-hosted Heroku alternative to pick for your stack.