Field Notes

Occasional notes on systems, networking, and the small things that break at 2am.

• 2026-10-12 Running a small VPS without regrets

  Firewalls, backups, and the four commands I run on every new box.

• 2026-09-28 A firewall is not a security strategy

  What a packet filter actually buys you, and what it quietly does not.

• 2026-09-03 Notes on QUIC and HTTP/3 in practice

  UDP is not the problem people think it is. Congestion control is.

• 2026-08-17 Backups you can actually restore

  A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis, not a backup.

• 2026-07-29 A few things I keep forgetting about DNS

  TTL is a hint, negative caching is real, and CNAMEs at the apex are a trap.