Articles

A practical guide to the four major Linux firewall technologies - iptables, nftables, firewalld, and ufw. Covers real-world cloud server hardening with concrete examples, from locking down SSH to building zone-based configurations. Includes an honest comparison and an entirely unbiased opinion about which firewall is actually best.

The second in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. This one covers ZFS from philosophy to practice: why it exists, how pools and datasets work, what checksumming and self-healing actually do, how to tune recordsize, compression, and atime, how encryption works with key management, how snapshots and the hidden .zfs directory give you time travel, and how ZFS send/recv turns backup and migration into a solved problem. Includes a look at sanoid/syncoid for automated snapshot management.

The first in a series on FreeBSD fundamentals. This one covers Jails from the ground up: why they exist, how classic Jails differ from VNET Jails, what epair interfaces actually are, how bridges tie it all together, and what devfs rules do for your isolation story. Practical configurations included.

Not another hjkl tutorial. This is the stuff you still get wrong after years of using Vim - efficient navigation, copy/paste that actually works, YAML-specific workflows, and the motions that turn config file editing from a chore into a joy.

Expanding a single BGP router into a two-PoP distributed network: adding a Vultr edge router with native BGP peering, three upstream GRE providers and iBGP to tie it together - plus the stateless PF rules that make transit routing actually work.