Tag: sysadmin

What is lost+found and why does it exist? fsck puts recovered file fragments there after a crash, and no, you can't delete it.

Running new hardware on Ubuntu LTS? The HWE kernel backports newer kernel and graphics support. Here's how to switch from generic to HWE safely.

The Linux commands every sysadmin reaches for daily, file ops, process management, networking, and text manipulation you can't live without.

Apt says packages have been kept back during upgrade. What the message means on Debian 12 and Ubuntu, why it happens, and how to install those packages safely.

Upgrade one package with apt and leave the rest alone. The exact flag, why apt upgrade nginx upgrades everything, version pinning, and held package behaviour.

xargs turns stdin into arguments, build complex pipelines, run parallel jobs, and handle filenames with spaces without breaking everything.

LVM lets you resize volumes, add disks, and take snapshots without repartitioning, PVs, VGs, and LVs explained with real commands.

socat wires TCP, UDP, Unix sockets, files, and serial ports together. Port forwarding, OpenSSL tunnels, traffic capture, this is netcat with superpowers.

List every user and group on Linux with /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and getent, see who is logged in, and separate system accounts from normal users by UID.

Monitor Linux servers with htop, iostat, netstat, vmstat, and Prometheus, pick the right tool for CPU, memory, disk, and network issues.

Your logs are in journald, not /var/log. journalctl queries that work, awk patterns that hold up, and five popular one-liners that quietly return nothing.

Set, verify, and sync your timezone in Ubuntu using timedatectl, one command to fix the clock on a newly provisioned server.