A whirlwind tour of systemd-nspawn containers (2025)(quantum5.ca)
43 points by ibobev | 7 comments
A blog tutorial on setting up and using systemd-nspawn containers, covering creating rootfses for Debian, Fedora, and Alpine and booting them.
#sysadmin on Hacker News
27 stories tagged sysadmin, newest first.
NixOS is making me less afraid(entropicthoughts.com)
140 points by ibobev | 138 comments
A blog post on Entropic Thoughts about how using NixOS makes the author less afraid to try and self-host software like FreshRSS.
Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains(reddit.com)
559 points by sashk | 290 comments
Reddit r/sysadmin post where a user reports Namecheap seized and disabled all their domains; the page loaded as a Reddit network-security block.
Calling It Quits on ServerFault(sysadmin1138.net)
66 points by zdw | 35 comments
Blog post by a long-serving ServerFault moderator, elected in 2011, announcing he is stepping down after over 15 years and reflecting on moderation.
Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel(reddit.com)
249 points by ksec | 69 comments
A Reddit r/sysadmin post warning that Grammarly sends messages to all organization users when an admin tries to cancel; the page shown is a Reddit block screen.
Backups Aren't Simple(filipovski.net)
318 points by afilipovski | 190 comments
Personal blog post by Aleksandar Filipovski arguing that backups are more complex than they seem, starting from a family story of losing photos to a reformatted drive.
Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)(peteris.rocks)
447 points by theanonymousone | 55 comments
A blog post explaining every field and value shown in the htop and top process monitors on Linux, such as load average, memory, and process states.
Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)(blog.hofstede.it)
564 points by zdw | 246 comments
A blog post sharing practical Unix shell tricks and keyboard shortcuts for bash and other shells to speed up everyday terminal work.
Why I love FreeBSD(it-notes.dragas.net)
485 points by enz | 246 comments
A personal blog post on the IT Notes site explaining why the author loves the FreeBSD operating system.
We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)(web.mit.edu)
618 points by giancarlostoro | 104 comments
Trey Harris's classic sysadmin story about a university department that couldn't send email farther than about 500 miles, and the debugging that explained why.
CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun(fulghum.io)
711 points by websku | 483 comments
Blog post arguing that CLI agents like Claude Code make running a self-hosted home server easier and fun, even for non-sysadmins.
Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system(github.com)
436 points by pranshuparmar | 82 comments
GitHub repository for witr, a Linux CLI tool that traces a process, service, or port back to its origin and explains why it is running.
Advent of Sysadmin 2025(sadservers.com)
325 points by lazyant | 104 comments
SadServers' Advent of Sysadmin 2025, a 12-day advent calendar of Linux and DevOps troubleshooting challenges running December 1–12.
The email they shouldn't have read(it-notes.dragas.net)
345 points by miniBill | 142 comments
A blog post on the IT Notes site recounting an incident involving an email that unauthorized parties read, touching on email privacy and server administration.
Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts(it-notes.dragas.net)
332 points by Bogdanp | 103 comments
Blog post on IT Notes, first in a series on building your own backup system, focusing on planning a backup strategy before writing scripts.
Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site(rachelbythebay.com)
380 points by mcbain | 384 comments
Blog post by Rachel by the Bay explaining why she dropped her traditional paid TLS certificate and moved to ACME-issued certs, after long distrust of the protocol and clients.
A server that wasn't meant to exist(it-notes.dragas.net)
377 points by jaypatelani | 121 comments
A post on the IT Notes blog recounting the story of a server that was never supposed to exist.
Anubis saved our websites from a DDoS attack(fabulous.systems)
317 points by DoctorOW | 237 comments
Blog post describing how the ScummVM project used the Anubis proof-of-work proxy to fend off a DDoS attack on its website, wiki, and forums.
The April Fools joke that might have got me fired(oldvcr.blogspot.com)
461 points by goldenskye | 226 comments
A blog post on Old Vintage Computing Research recounting an April Fools prank the author played at his first university database programming job.
Boring tech is mature, not old(rubenerd.com)
429 points by mikece | 243 comments
Ruben Schade blog post arguing that "boring" technology like NetBSD is a mark of maturity and predictability valued by sysadmins, not age.
Visual guide to SSH tunneling and port forwarding (2023)(ittavern.com)
340 points by todsacerdoti | 49 comments
An illustrated guide explaining SSH tunneling and local, remote, and dynamic port forwarding, published on ittavern.com in 2023.
Linux Crisis Tools(brendangregg.com)
450 points by samber | 100 comments
Brendan Gregg blog post listing Linux "crisis tools" packages (procps, sysstat, bpfcc-tools, etc.) to preinstall on servers for diagnosing performance outages.
Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat(rachelbythebay.com)
568 points by l0b0 | 356 comments
Blog post by Rachel Kroll about periodically dumping and diffing a company LDAP directory to track which employees have left.
Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers(cockpit-project.org)
396 points by thunderbong | 164 comments
Homepage of Cockpit, an open-source web-based graphical interface for administering Linux servers, showing Version 302 released 5 Oct 2023.
Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002)(web.mit.edu)
1065 points by dvrp | 182 comments
Trey Harris's classic sysadmin story about a statistics department that could not send email farther than about 500 miles, traced to a sendmail misconfiguration and timeouts.
How I run my servers (2022)(blog.wesleyac.com)
345 points by ingve | 147 comments
Wesley Aptekar-Cassels's 2022 blog post describing how he runs and deploys his own server software on VMs instead of cloud services.
Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located(utcc.utoronto.ca)
1642 points by ingve | 444 comments
Chris Siebenmann blog post arguing that programs using configuration files should have an obvious command-line way to report where those files are located.