Notes

Keeping a home server boring

The best thing a small server can be is uneventful. Fewer moving parts, fewer surprises after an update. Most of my outages came from clever setups I could not remember six months later.

Rule of thumb: if a change cannot be explained in two sentences, it will be hard to debug at midnight.

Backups you actually restore from

A backup nobody has restored is a rumour. Once a quarter I take the most recent copy and bring it up somewhere else, start to finish. Twice this caught a broken job that had been silently writing empty files for weeks.

Notes on reading other people's code

Reading beats guessing. Before assuming a library cannot do something, it is usually faster to open the source and look. More often than not the feature is already there, one function away.