Category: system administration

Systemd by Example: What Actually Happens When You Type systemctl restart nginx

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Understanding the Sequence

Systemd is the heartbeat of most modern Linux systems.
When you run:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

you trigger a full chain of actions – not a single binary reload.
Systemd reads unit definitions, resolves dependencies, checks targets, and updates logs.
Knowing what happens gives you clarity when a service misbehaves.

You don’t need to fight systemd. You just need to understand its rhythm.

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The Forgotten Basics: Why ps, grep, and awk Still Beat Fancy Tools

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The Forgotten Basics

Modern dashboards look impressive. Yet, when systems fail, we return to the shell.
The basics – ps, grep, awk, ip, nmcli, sed, uniq, sort – never left.

They are still the quickest path between question and answer.

This post is not nostalgia. It’s about precision, control, and speed.
The old tools survive because they do exactly what we ask.

The UNIX philosophy is still alive: one task – one tool.

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Breadcrumbs In The Wire – Why OPSEC Is Important

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OPSEC Is Not For The Military

Operational Security (OPSEC) isn’t a military secret – it’s a survival tool.
People think it’s for soldiers, spies, or hackers.
But it’s for civilians. For you.
Every day, you leave trails: where you go, who you talk to, what you buy.
Someone is watching. Someone is connecting the dots.
OPSEC is the discipline of controlling your own story before someone else writes it for you.

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Protecting The Wire – Semaphore Behind SSL Proxy

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Mission Brief

Plain text communication is loud. It’s bleeding data.
Prying eyes can see every bit in the wire.

You have to isolate the backend – the Semaphore UI and MySQL containers stay locked down. Unreachable for the external work.
Open a tiny hole on the stronghold to the world – the frontend is an NginX SSL proxy.

You use:

  • Podman pod for network and container isolation
  • The Semaphore and MySQL containers without exposing them to the world
  • An NginX proxy container with SSL
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