Notes from the terminal
Runbooks, post-mortems and the things I wish someone had written down before I learned them at 3am. Written for people who actually have to do this work.
Zero-Downtime cPanel Migration: A Field-Tested Runbook
The complete sequence I follow to move live accounts between servers — pre-flight audit, TTL staging, the first full sync, the delta sync during the window, verification, and the rollback plan you hope never to use.
Read runbookHardening a Fresh Linux Server: The First 30 Minutes
Everything I do between "the server exists" and "the server is safe to put traffic on": user and SSH policy, firewall, kernel parameters, automatic updates, time sync, and the audit logging you'll want after an incident.
Read checklistDiagnosing High Server Load Without Guessing
Load average is a symptom, not a cause. A repeatable triage order — is it CPU, I/O or memory? then which process? then why? — that gets you to the actual problem instead of another reboot.
Read the methodSPF, DKIM and DMARC, Explained for Hosting Admins
Why customer mail lands in spam, what each of the three records actually proves, the mistakes I see most often (hello, ten DNS lookups), and how to roll out DMARC without silently dropping legitimate mail.
Read the guideReading the Signs: Detecting a Compromised Server Early
The quiet symptoms that show up before the defacement or the blacklisting — and the containment order that keeps you from destroying the evidence you'll need to work out how they got in.
Read the guideMySQL Slow Query Triage for Hosting Engineers
Finding the query that's eating the server when you don't own the application and can't read its source — slow query log, EXPLAIN, indexes, and knowing when the honest answer is "this needs a developer".
Read the guideNo articles match that search.
Questions about anything I've written?
If something here helped, broke, or you think I've got it wrong — I'd genuinely like to hear about it. The corrections are how these get better.