Notes

Short notes on keeping small servers tidy.

Rotate your logs before they rotate you

A full disk is the most boring outage there is. Set size limits in journald, give every service a logrotate rule, and check once a quarter that the rules still match the paths the services actually write to.

One timer is better than three cron lines

Systemd timers keep their own history, survive missed runs and show up in one list. Moving the nightly jobs took an evening and removed a whole class of “did it run?” questions.

Write down why, not what

The config already says what is set. A one-line comment about why it is set that way is the part nobody can reconstruct a year later.