Linux Café

Disk‑full crashes are the most common reason a VPS goes from “alive” to “dead” overnight.
A log file or a database that blows past the allotted space will make the kernel refuse any further writes, and every process that needs to touch the disk will start failing. If you’re running a website, mail server, or database, that’s a service outage you can’t afford.

The silver lining? A handful of LVM tricks and a tiny monitoring script can get you back up in minutes and keep future incidents at bay.
Below I walk through a real‑world scenario on a Debian‑based VPS, but the ideas carry over to any distro that uses LVM and systemd.

Rootless Podman Volumes: Keeping Your Data Safe Across Upgrades

Rootless Podman lets you run containers without ever touching sudo.
That’s great, but it also means every volume lives in your home directory.
When you bump Podman or your distro, the storage layout can change and all your data can get wiped.
Below is a practical, coffee‑talk style walk‑through that shows how to sidestep this trap.

Why Rootless Volumes Are Different

When you run

ProxyJump timeouts when a VPN drops your IP address

When you hop through a bastion with ssh -J, the jump host keeps a TCP tunnel open to the target.
If you’re on a VPN that can change your public IP or even tear the tunnel down, that tunnel can stall or die.
The result? A hanging SSH that eventually spits out “Connection timed out” or “Connection reset by peer”.
For homelab users who rely on VPNs for remote access, this is the kind of annoyance that keeps you awake at night.

Keep a VPN alive when the home router flips between DHCP and static

I’ve been on a laptop that plugs into a home router that sometimes hands out a DHCP lease and other times uses a static IP you set in the admin UI. The VPN client (OpenVPN 3‑CLI on Ubuntu 24.04) would drop the tunnel as soon as the interface lost its address, forcing me to reconnect manually. Below is a minimal, reproducible setup that keeps the tunnel up regardless of the router’s mode.

Running a production MySQL instance on a small home‑lab server is a common scenario for many of us. The database is the heart of the service, but it also means that any backup strategy must preserve consistency while keeping the application online. Restic is a popular, fast, deduplicating backup tool that works well with block‑level snapshots and remote backends. In this post I’ll walk through a practical, repeatable method to test incremental Restic backups against a live MySQL server, covering the trade‑offs, commands, and pitfalls you’ll encounter.

The 2‑second DNS lookup lag on a Pi – a hands‑on fix

I was running a Pi‑4‑based home‑lab that hosts a few services: a personal Git server, a small reverse‑proxy stack, and a few IoT sensors that ping the Pi every few seconds. Every time I pinged a domain that wasn’t in the local cache, I noticed a ~2 s pause before the first packet left the network interface. On a desktop that latency was negligible, but on the Pi it was a noticeable hiccup that made the sensor logs look a little jittery.

The 30‑second Nginx start‑up mystery on an 8‑core ARM box

I had a clean 8‑core ARM server (Cortex‑A72, 4 GB RAM) running Debian 12. Nginx was the only service that took longer than a couple of seconds to come up. The log said “started” after 30 s, but the system was idle otherwise. I wanted to know why a stateless web server was so slow to boot on a modern CPU.

I was in the middle of setting up a tiny homelab VM that bridges straight to the host. The guest could ping the gateway just fine, but ip addr show br0 was staring back at me with no inet line. The bridge was up, state UP, yet no IPv4. What’s going on?

1. Distinguish link‑state from IP‑state

ip link only tells you about the link layer. An interface can be physically up and still have no IP if the DHCP client never got a lease or a static config never ran.

Wayland is the default display server on most modern Linux distributions, but it can bite when you try to run GPU‑heavy games on a laptop. The problem isn’t that Wayland is broken; it’s that the default configuration prioritises smoothness over power‑saving. If you’re a sysadmin or a homelab hobbyist who also likes to play, you’ll find that a few targeted tweaks can give you both decent gaming performance and a respectable battery life.

Backups are the lifeblood of any homelab or small server. I usually run a nightly rsync job that copies hundreds of gigabytes from a production NFS share to a local Btrfs snapshot. On a 4‑core workstation the job is usually a quiet background task, but sometimes the process spikes to 100 % CPU and the terminal I use to monitor the job freezes. The culprit is often the default scheduling class and priority that rsync inherits from the shell.