Sep 18, 2026 | Infrastructure, Reliability
A replicated storage cluster’s core promise is that a copy of your data lives on more than one machine, so losing a machine loses no data. That promise is enforced by a placement rule, and the rule has a setting for what counts as a separate failure domain: a...
Sep 18, 2026 | Infrastructure, Reliability, Self-hosting
Logs are the thing everyone agrees they should centralise and nobody wants to pay for. The usual outcome is that the noisy source drowns the useful one, retention gets cut to a week, and the one event you needed is three days past the edge of the index. I centralised...
Sep 18, 2026 | Infrastructure, Reliability
Half the drives in my fleet had no reported age, no wear level and no temperature. Not wrong values — no values. And I did not know, because the dashboard showed the drives that did report, and a missing row does not look like anything. Why the standard collector was...
Sep 17, 2026 | Infrastructure, Networking
Two remote sites each needed to run a handful of workloads locally: a tunnel connector, a file share, a sync client, a load balancer. Previously each ran a small collection of hand-built virtual machines and containers, all configured individually, all drifting. Each...
Sep 11, 2026 | Infrastructure, Self-hosting
Over roughly six weeks I stood up twenty self-hosted services on my own infrastructure, each replacing something that is normally a subscription: ticketing, file sharing, URL shortening, RSS, video meetings, backup management, file indexing, developer tools, a spatial...
Sep 11, 2026 | Infrastructure, Reliability
Infrastructure-as-code tools keep a state file describing what they believe exists. Most backends support a lock, so two runs cannot write that file at once. The object-storage backend I use does not. I knew that. I had read it. I did not understand what it meant...