Notes on small, durable systems

I run a handful of servers for myself, family and a couple of small clients. These are the notes I wish I had found the first time: what broke, what I changed, and what has quietly kept working since.

• 2026-10-12
  The restore drill: testing backups you have never restored

  Backups are a hypothesis until you restore one. A quarterly routine with restic and a scratch VM.

• 2026-08-27
  nginx on a 512 MB box

  Worker counts, buffer sizes and the three settings that actually mattered on a tiny VPS.

• 2026-06-03
  Moving my cron jobs to systemd timers

  Logging, missed runs and randomized delays — why I finally switched, and the one thing I miss.

Older notes from before the move to this domain are being cleaned up and will return gradually.