Posts

My deploy ran my tests, and my tests ran my deploy

My desktop ran out of memory five times in two days, once killing 29,082 processes at a stroke. Two files that were each sensible on their own had made a loop with no way out.

Wednesday, October 21, 2026 | 6 min read Read

A memory limit made Grafana hammer the disk

Grafana stalled for minutes while the host had more than 4 GB of memory available. The clue that it was starving for memory was the NVMe reading 1.7 GB a second.

Sunday, October 18, 2026 | 5 min read Read

My NAS was doing a server's job, so I bought it a server

My ZimaBoard was holding my photos, my documents, my monitoring and my AI agents in 7.5 GiB. The agents were the reason the fix had to be a second machine.

Sunday, October 18, 2026 | 6 min read Read

Railway shows my request counts but won't export them

Railway's dashboard knows how many requests my app served, but there's nothing for Prometheus to scrape. Turning its per-minute figures into a counter goes wrong three ways.

Sunday, October 11, 2026 | 7 min read Read

A third of my request was the garbage collector

A slow grid in a Flask app I maintain had an obvious suspect. The biggest cost was Python re-checking 134,000 objects that would never be freed.

Friday, October 9, 2026 | 7 min read Read

The 03:37 alert that was never sent

My monitoring pinned a 3am outage on Cloudflare within seconds, and my notes said my phone was paged at 03:37. Nothing had been sent, ever.

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 | 5 min read Read

The folder on the RAID that wasn't

My photo library was on the one drive with no mirror. The obvious folder to move it to, on the mirror, was a symlink straight back to the photos.

Sunday, September 27, 2026 | 5 min read Read

Every site is monitored twice

I set up uptime monitoring for my sites and nearly made every check meaningless. They all sit behind Cloudflare, and a plain HTTP check there proves that Cloudflare answered, not that my app is alive.

Saturday, September 19, 2026 | 3 min read Read

Homepage kept showing My First Group

I replaced the example config on my Homepage dashboard and the page source still showed the examples. It survived a full container recreate, because it was never my config to begin with.

Saturday, September 19, 2026 | 3 min read Read

One character in /etc/shadow locked me out

A fresh container refused my SSH key with Permission denied (publickey). The key was right, the sshd config was right, and the account had a single exclamation mark where it needed an asterisk.

Saturday, September 19, 2026 | 2 min read Read

The Tailscale login that could never finish

I installed Tailscale in a container, approved the login link, watched the node appear in my tailnet, and then watched it sit offline. It had sixty seconds to log in, and a browser login takes longer than that.

Saturday, September 19, 2026 | 3 min read Read

The ZimaOS update the updater never offered

My ZimaBoard had been running an eight-month-old alpha since January, and the built-in updater said there was nothing newer. There was. Getting to it meant learning what 100% on the root filesystem actually means on this box.

Saturday, September 19, 2026 | 3 min read Read