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A collection of 18 posts

A better system for communication

I’ve been a privacy advocate for quite a long time. In that time, I’ve used countless tools, applications and even written my own systems to facilitate communication and transfer of information. For over three years I’ve been using Signal and various other tools to communicate with family

Monitoring my servers with Prometheus - Part 2

After sharing my previous post, I had some questions about what actual exporters I’m using, where and why! In this post I’ll tackle the exporters themselves, why I selected them and how they’re being used. If you haven’t read the previous article yet, I encourage you

Why use a hosting control panel like DirectAdmin? What should you pick?

When I was a new system administrator over 10 years, I was always against control panels. Thinking back, I didn’t like panels because I wanted to explore and dig into every internal myself. While it was excellent for self-taught knowledge for my career, around four years ago I began

/64. It's not that hard.

As service providers begin to dish out IPv6 ranges, it’s become apparent that they don’t quite understand how IPv6 should be handed out. Handing out a single or smaller than /64 IPv6 range is unnecessary — especially if you’re a hosting provider. I’ve been hosting customers for

DirectAdmin Wish-list

As I use DirectAdmin more and more, I’ve become very fond of the product and believe it’s well worth the money for it. Like any product, however, I’ve got some wish-list items that would be great if the developers would integrate. Unlike most wish-lists, I’ve spent

Why should you consider using an Email Relay like SES?

You’ve probably heard the warning about how running your own email server is difficult. For many years I’ve ran my own email server, and it is definitely anything but difficult. Spamassassin cleans up the spam, rspamd does the outbound filtering to make sure no accounts have been compromised

Installing OpenLiteSpeed on DirectAdmin

I recently switched to OpenLiteSpeed server on my DirectAdmin (hosting this very blog!) and wanted to share the simple installation process and tweaking the total workers available! By default, DirectAdmin ships with stock Apache. In most cases, stock Apache will work, however, OpenLiteSpeed is a good alternative for your infrastructure!

Configuring your DirectAdmin server to use Amazon SES

I’ve recently migrated from Plesk to DirectAdmin, and one of the things I wanted to configure was Amazon SES for sending emails through my server. I prefer SES due to the pay-as-you-go model. In one month if I send zero emails, I’d rather not be paying for emails,

Backing up the giants: DirectAdmin Edition

I recently decided it was time to upgrade my server, and I wanted to give my workflow a face-lift. I’ve been using DirectAdmin a lot recently, and it’s shaped out to be quite a resourceful panel that let’s me get stuff done. But, coming from systems like

Plesk: I'm impressed.

Update: I’ve updated this blog post as time’s went on, please see the bottom of the post for my review over one year. As you may or may not know, I’ve been running this blog’s server using Plesk Onyx (now, Obsidian). It’s stable, it’s

Monitoring my servers with Prometheus

I love to monitor all my infrastructure, and it’s came a long way since I started doing it. My first pass at monitoring was years ago using Nagios, then I evolved into using influxdb. Alas, as time changes and my needs evolve, influxdb just wasn’t sitting very well

New Website Design!

After using the free Primer theme by GoDaddy for a long time on this blog, I’ve decided to switch it up. I was browsing through other technology-gaming-pentesting related blogs and saw that most use darker themes, and are usually pretty clean. I wanted to strike with something darker, good

IPAM: Network and rack oversight made easy.

As you may be able to tell I’m a big fan of IPAM. My initial impression was this software is fantastic and free, it’s fully lived up to my expectations. I’ve got a fair amount of networking going on in my servers, linking them together then back

Why I colocate my hardware

I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I colocate my servers, and this post will explain the reason behind that! Bandwidth Where I live currently, we have stable but slow bandwidth, and there isn’t very good upload speed. I like to stream my music off Plex

NoMachine: My review

I’ve been experimenting with NoMachine since yesterday to see how it holds it. So far it’s been a successful test on my local machine, and I can easily connect to remote machines. Pros Latency? What latency! Generally, you don’t notice much if any latency when using NoMachine,

Bypassing Corporate Firewalls - Today was different.

Firewalls are designed with the best intentions in mind, but, they come with their faults. As a systems administrator, I have to routinely deal with users evading the firewalls with ssh tunnels. Some are unknowingly doing this, by using an application with embedded malware against company policies that tries to

Happy Sysadmin Day!

To all my fellow Sysadmins out there, happy sysadmin day! It’s been quite a year so far. The technology and landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, the support ticket numbers keep rising, and the root question never changes — only evolves upon the previous. Remember, keep your important documents

PHP IPAM: An excellent tool for managing your resources

For the longest time, I’ve been using Spreadsheets to manage my inventory, the servers, and network configurations. I recently switched to using PHPIPAM, and it’s been a godsend. Disclaimer: This blog post is a continuous draft, and will be updated as I learn more about PHPIPAM and explore