Linux Process Management: ps, top, kill, and systemctl Audit
A logistics client paged us at 3 AM because their order API was returning 502s. The fix took ninety seconds once we logged in. Finding the runaway Python worker with p…
NGINX Serving WordPress: Recommended Config for Performance
While working on a migration for a client running three high-traffic WordPress sites last month, I got an idea for writing up the NGINX WordPress configuration I keep…
Bash Functions: Defining, Calling, and Returning Values
Last quarter a client’s deployment script hit 900 lines with zero bash functions. Just a massive wall of sequential commands. When something broke at 2 AM, nobody coul…
vSphere 6.7 Fault Tolerance: VMDK and RDM Restriction Checklist
One of our managed healthcare accounts called in after a failed attempt to enable Fault Tolerance on a production SQL VM. The VM had a 2.5TB data disk. vSphere threw a…
Ansible Playbooks: Writing Your First YAML Automation for Linux
A healthcare logistics client we support runs a mixed fleet of about 45 Linux servers — CentOS and RHEL, mostly. Their infrastructure team had been managing those mach…
NGINX Load Balancing Methods: Round Robin, Least Connections, IP Hash
A client called us on a Friday afternoon because their e-commerce site had been dropping orders all week. Their NGINX load balancer showed all three backend servers as…
GitHub CI/CD Automation: Stop Deploying Like It’s 2012
A dev team we inherited during a client onboarding was doing manual deployments via FTP. In 2025. One guy held all the credentials. He’d SSH into the box, pull from Gi…
Nginx Server Optimization: Lessons from a 3AM Production Outage
Our monitoring board looked fine at 11 PM. By 3 AM, we had 5,000 queued connections and a site returning 502 errors to every visitor. That night became our real educat…
Ansible Automation: Server Management and Patching at Scale
The change request was direct: patch all web servers before Friday’s maintenance window. Forty-three RHEL 8 hosts, one engineer, no automation. I tried it manually the…
Kubernetes Cluster Management Essentials for IT Ops
Three nodes went NotReady at 2 AM on a Friday. Our on-call engineer spent two hours clicking through dashboards, running kubectl commands one at a time, and cross-refe…
VMware vSphere Administration Tips That Save Time
We had a client come to us six months post-deployment with a vSphere cluster running at 78% average CPU utilization across all hosts. DRS was enabled. HA was enabled…
GitHub Discussions: Community Engagement for IT Teams
GitHub Discussions is a collaborative communication feature built directly into GitHub repositories, enabling threaded conversations, polls, and structured community f…