Experiments, lessons, and practical guides from running Linux services and personal infrastructure at home.
A service fails at 02:00, leaves a useful explanation in the journal, and stays unnoticed until someone needs it the next morning. A restart policy may recover the process, but recovery and visibility are different questions. How can a small home server creat…
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A service should start after another service. That sounds like one rule, but systemd hears at least two separate questions: should starting…
A home server often asks one small machine to do several jobs at once. A web application, database, thumbnail generator, and background wor…
A background service needs a database password before it can do useful work. Putting that password in Environment= looks convenient: the ap…
A process can still have a PID, consume little CPU, and appear as active (running) while its useful work has stopped. Its event loop may be…
A service can be absent from the process list while its address is already listening. That sounds contradictory only if the daemon must own…
A small service needs somewhere to put a Unix socket, a database, downloaded metadata, and perhaps its own log files. Creating one writable…
There is a version of this question that sounds obvious and is not: HTTP/3 has been a published IETF standard since June 2022, most browser…
A service starts during boot, tries to contact a remote endpoint, and fails because the machine has not finished acquiring an address. Addi…
A job is scheduled every five minutes, but one run occasionally needs six. When the next trigger arrives, should it start a second copy, wa…
