Linux VPS
Distro tips, OS reload, rescue mode, and the per-VPS portal tooling (browser console, live stats, graphs).
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SELinux is on by default on AlmaLinux (and RHEL, Rocky, CentOS Stream). It enforces a mandatory access control policy on top of regular Unix permissions — even…
The Console tab in your service panel opens a browser-based serial console attached directly to your VM's display. It's what saves you when SSH stops working —…
The "which distro?" question gets reopened every few years as the ecosystem shifts. LYLIX offers three Linux distros — Debian, Ubuntu Server, and AlmaLinux…
Linux gives you two ways to schedule recurring work: the 50-year-old cron, and systemd timers. Both work. They have different tradeoffs, and "always use one"…
Debian stable is famously conservative — the version of any given package in stable is whatever shipped when that Debian release came out. That's great for…
A full disk on a VPS cascades fast: new SSH sessions can't write to ~/.ssh, services can't write logs, MariaDB refuses inserts, mail spool stops accepting…
Docker (and its rootless cousin Podman) is a popular way to run multiple applications on a single VPS in isolated containers. On a small VPS — say 1 vCPU and 2…
The chmod/chown trio (owner-group-other × read-write-execute) is enough for most file permission needs. When it isn't — when you need a fourth identity, or…
The default sshd_config on most cloud images is "open enough to be usable." Anything internet-facing draws constant brute- force traffic — your VPS auth.log…
Every Linux distro updates the kernel periodically — security CVEs, hardware support, performance fixes. The new kernel installs alongside the running one…
Every application that logs to a file under /var/log/ eventually fills the disk if nothing rotates it. Distro packages usually drop a logrotate config for…
Every modern Linux distro now ships with nftables as the native firewall backend; iptables is kept around as a compatibility shim. Existing iptables rules…
Every Linux distro has settled on one of three network configuration systems, and which one you're dealing with determines where you edit IP addresses, set…
You ran an OS reload from the customer portal and the result came back: Service: NNNN, Distro: <name>, Error: Invalid template. This article explains what that…
OS reload wipes your VPS clean and re-provisions it from a fresh cloud-init image — different distribution if you want, same one if you just want to start…
Linux out of the box runs fine for most workloads. The "performance tuning" articles you find online often paste 50 sysctl lines that were optimal in 2009 —…
The Graphs tab on every VPS draws four utilization charts pulled straight from the hypervisor: CPU, memory, network, and disk. This article explains what each…
Every troubleshooting article tells you to "check the logs." This article tells you which log, with what flag, looking for what. A practical tour of the places…
Rescue mode boots your VPS from a SystemRescue ISO instead of its own disk. The disk is still attached, untouched, and ready to be mounted from the rescue…
You don't need Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and a week to get useful monitoring on a single VPS. Netdata installs in one command, captures real-time metrics for…
Keeping logs locally is fine until you actually need them — at which point either the disk is full and they've rotated away, or the VPS that crashed is exactly…
If you SSH into more than three machines, your ~/.ssh/config is doing more work than you think. The default behavior is fine; the power-user behavior shaves…
Swap on a VPS lives in a fuzzy zone of folk wisdom: "you don't need swap if you have enough RAM," "swap will thrash and kill performance," "but actually you…
Wrong clocks break things in ways that are infuriating to debug: TLS handshakes fail with "certificate not yet valid," log timestamps lie about when events…
Ubuntu LTS releases every two years (20.04, 22.04, 24.04, 26.04 ...). When an LTS approaches end-of-standard-support (5 years from release), you have to either…
Manually running apt upgrade every week is a discipline most operators lose within three months of provisioning. Unattended security updates are the cheap…
Logging into a fresh VPS as root via password is fine for the first 10 minutes. After that you want named user accounts with SSH keys and sudo scoped to what…
Every modern Linux distro uses systemd as PID 1; sooner or later you need to run your own service under it (a custom Python app, a Go daemon, a backup script)…