September 19, 2025
WP-CLI: A Comprehensive Guide to Managing WordPress from the Command Line
Introduction
WP-CLI is the official command-line tool for WordPress, allowing you to manage your sites without logging into the admin panel. With WP-CLI, you can install plugins, update WordPress core, manage users, handle database tasks, and even run advanced automation workflows.
In this guide, we’ll explore what WP-CLI is, how to install it, and provide practical examples of its most useful commands.
September 18, 2025
Netplan: advanced network configuration (tunnels, VLAN, bridges, bonding)
Introduction
Netplan is a utility for declarative network configuration in Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, and derivatives).
It is usually used for simple cases like Ethernet or Wi-Fi, but it can do much more:
- tunnel interfaces (IPIP, GRE, VXLAN, WireGuard),
- VLAN,
- bridges,
- bonding (interface aggregation).
These features allow building complex network topologies — from home VPNs to data centers and cloud environments.
Tunnel interfaces
Tunnels encapsulate packets of one protocol into another. They are used for VPNs, inter-server connections, or network isolation.
September 17, 2025
Network Troubleshooting for Beginners: Listening to the Wires
Introduction
Imagine: ping works, DNS responds, ports are open, mtr shows no loss, but curl returns errors like connection reset by peer or SSL handshake failed. There’s clearly a problem, but standard tools are powerless.
At such moments, the only option is to look at the actual traffic — in other words, “listen to the wires.” This process is called packet sniffing or packet analysis. In this article, we’ll go through how to use three key tools: tcpdump, sngrep, and Wireshark.
September 16, 2025
Network Troubleshooting for Beginners: The Swiss Army Knives of Diagnostics
Introduction
Up to this point, we’ve used simple utilities for specific tasks:
ping checked connectivity,traceroute showed the path,ipconfig and arp helped with the local network,telnet and nc tested ports.
That’s like having a separate hammer, screwdriver, and wrench. But sometimes you need a multi-purpose tool. Today we’ll look at three such “all-in-one” tools:
mtr — ping + traceroute on steroids,nmap — universal network scanner,curl — a command-line browser.
mtr — Real-Time Traceroute 🚀
What does it do?
Combines the features of ping and traceroute. In real time, it shows latency and packet loss percentage for each hop along the path.
September 15, 2025
Network Troubleshooting for Beginners: Is the Door Open? (Ports)
Introduction
A server’s IP address is like the postal address of an apartment building. But to reach the right apartment, you need the door number. In networking, these doors are ports.
- HTTP runs on port 80.
- HTTPS — on port 443.
- Mail, databases, and other services listen on their own ports.
If a port is closed or nothing is listening on it, the site won’t open — even if the server is “alive.”
September 14, 2025
Network Troubleshooting for Beginners: The Internet’s Phone Book (DNS)
Introduction
You’ve gone through all the checks from the previous articles:
- The computer has the correct IP address (
ipconfig). - The router responds (
ping 192.168.1.1). - Ping to a public address (
ping 8.8.8.8) works.
Looks like the internet is fine! But the browser won’t open google.com. 🤔
Welcome to the most common cause of such issues — DNS failures.
What is DNS? 📖
The internet runs on IP addresses (e.g., 142.250.184.110), but people prefer names (google.com).
September 13, 2025
Network Troubleshooting for Beginners: Check Under Your Feet
Introduction
In the previous article, we learned how to reach out to remote servers using ping and trace the path of packets with traceroute. But what if ping google.com doesn’t work, and traceroute stops right at the first step?
That’s a clear sign that the problem is nearby: on your computer, in the network cable, or in your home router. Before calling tech support, let’s check our own local network.
September 12, 2025
Real-Time Revolution: Diving into the World of WebSockets and Long Polling
Introduction
Modern users expect web applications to work as fast and responsive as native software. Chats, stock quotes, collaborative document editing — all these scenarios require instant data exchange. In this article, we’ll break down how Long Polling works, why it was replaced by WebSockets, and how to properly configure these technologies on popular web servers.
The Real-Time Problem and the First Solution: Long Polling
HTTP was originally designed for the request-response model: the client contacts the server, the server replies, and the connection closes. For dynamic applications, this is inconvenient.
September 6, 2025
Caddy vs. Traefik vs. HAProxy vs. Nginx vs. Apache
Introduction
Choosing a web server and reverse proxy today depends on tasks and infrastructure.
Caddy, Traefik, HAProxy, Nginx, and Apache are five popular solutions, each with its strengths and weaknesses.
In this article, we’ll compare them by key criteria: philosophy, installation, SSL, CI/CD, and complexity.
Comparison by Key Criteria
| Criterion | Caddy | Traefik | HAProxy | Nginx | Apache |
|---|
| Philosophy | Simplicity, automatic SSL | Dynamic routing and Service Discovery | High-performance load balancer | Universal web server and proxy | Classic web server, static approach |
| Installation | Single binary | Container, requires setup | Single binary, manual configuration | OS package, easy installation | OS package, easy installation |
| SSL Automation | Built-in, main advantage | Built-in, part of ecosystem | No (requires external integration, e.g., certbot) | Partial (via certbot or modules) | Partial (via certbot or modules) |
| CI/CD | Very easy integration | Ideal for microservices | Used for high-load balancing | Requires manual steps, integration possible | Requires manual steps, integration possible |
| Complexity | Low, beginner-friendly | Medium/high, requires orchestrator knowledge | Medium, more complex configs | Medium, rich ecosystem | Medium, often bloated configs |
| Performance | Good, but not top-tier | Good | Excellent, optimized for load balancing | Excellent | Average |
| Best Use Case | Local development, quick MVPs | Docker/Kubernetes, microservices | High-load systems, load balancing | Universal choice for web and proxy | Static site hosting, legacy systems |
Who Is It For?
🔹 Caddy
Ideal for:
September 5, 2025
Traefik: A Dynamic Router for the Container Era
Introduction
Unlike Caddy, which focuses on simplicity, Traefik (pronounced Traffic) was built to solve one specific task: routing traffic in dynamic environments.
It is a reverse proxy and load balancer designed specifically for Docker, Kubernetes, and other orchestrators.
The main difference from Nginx is not static configuration, but the ability to automatically discover and serve services.
Key Concepts: Dynamic Configuration
The philosophy of Traefik is built on the principle of Service Discovery.
September 5, 2025
Logrotate and Docker: Why and How?
Introduction
Logrotate is a powerful tool for log management in Linux, but its interaction with Docker has its own specifics.
This guide explains how to properly use logrotate with Docker containers and when it’s better to rely on Docker’s built-in log management tools.
Docker Containers and Logs
Docker collects logs from the standard output streams (stdout and stderr) of containers and, by default, stores them as JSON files:
September 4, 2025
Caddy: A Web Server That Just Works and SSL Out of the Box
Introduction
In a world where setting up a web server often requires studying complex configuration files, Caddy offers a radically different approach.
It is a modern, multifunctional web server, reverse proxy, and certificate authority in one package.
Caddy was created with a single goal: to provide maximum simplicity.
If you are tired of the redundancy of Nginx or Apache, then Caddy is what you’re looking for.
Its main “killer feature” is fully automatic SSL certificate management, making it an indispensable tool for developers.
August 5, 2025
Introduction: A Hidden Network Issue
Developers and system administrators using servers on the OpenStack platform (for example, the C*-M*-D* hosting plans from reg.ru) sometimes encounter mysterious network problems. The internet seems to work, but when trying to transfer large amounts of data or establish connections to certain services, requests may hang or fail due to timeouts.
The provider explains this issue as a feature of their infrastructure:
Servers on the OpenStack platform use VxLAN technology, which reserves 50 bytes for service information. Because of this, the maximum transmission unit (MTU) on the server’s main network interface (ens3) is 1450 bytes.
July 21, 2025
Loki + Grafana: A Lightweight and Cost-Effective Logging Solution for the Cloud
We’re wrapping up our series on centralized logging with a modern and innovative solution: Loki together with Grafana. Developed by Grafana Labs, this stack reimagines how logging works — making it simple, efficient, and especially appealing for those already using Prometheus.
What Is Loki and How Does It Work?
Loki is a log aggregation system designed to minimize resource usage. It indexes only metadata (labels), while the log messages themselves are stored in compressed form — following the same philosophy as Prometheus, but for logs.
July 20, 2025
Graylog: A Flexible and User-Friendly Log Management Solution
We’ve already covered ELK Stack and OpenSearch — powerful logging tools with scalable architectures. Now let’s take a look at Graylog — a dedicated log management platform offering convenience, powerful processing, and flexible alerting.
What Is Graylog and How Does It Work?
Graylog is a centralized log management system designed for ease of use and rich capabilities. Unlike the ELK Stack, Graylog was built from the ground up as a unified platform.
July 19, 2025
We’ve explored the ELK Stack, its power — and, unfortunately, its licensing changes. These changes sparked debate within the open-source community and led to the creation of a worthy alternative — OpenSearch.
OpenSearch is a fully open-source fork of the last open versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana, released under the Apache 2.0 license. The project was initiated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2021 and has since evolved as an independent open-source initiative under the OpenSearch Project.
July 18, 2025
ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana): The Classic Stack for Log Collection and Analysis
After establishing that centralized logging is not just a convenience but a necessity, it’s time to dive into specific tools. Let’s start with one of the most well-known and widely adopted solutions in the logging world — the ELK Stack.
The ELK Stack is a set of three open-source components developed by Elastic. It provides a powerful, flexible, and scalable solution for log collection, processing, storage, search, and visualization.
July 17, 2025
Why Do We Need Centralized Logging? Making Sense of Log Chaos
We’ve already discussed the importance of metrics monitoring for understanding the health of your IT infrastructure. But metrics are only part of the picture. To truly understand what’s happening inside your systems and applications, you need logs.
Logs are records of events generated by operating systems, applications, network devices, and nearly any software component. They capture what, when, where, and why something happened. Think of them as the “black box” of your infrastructure — an invaluable source of information for debugging, auditing, and incident investigation.
July 16, 2025
In our series on monitoring systems, we’ve reviewed Munin, Prometheus with Grafana, and Zabbix. Now it’s time to talk about a solution that addresses one of the main pain points of Prometheus users — long-term, scalable, and efficient time-series storage. Meet VictoriaMetrics, a high-performance and cost-effective TSDB (time-series database) that perfectly complements the Prometheus ecosystem when paired with Grafana for visualization.
What Is VictoriaMetrics and Why Do You Need It?
Prometheus handles real-time monitoring and storage well, but its built-in TSDB isn’t designed for long-term retention or scaling to terabytes or petabytes of data. That’s where VictoriaMetrics comes in.
July 16, 2025
In a world where cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, protecting remote access to servers and network equipment is of paramount importance. Simply opening ports for SSH, RDP, or web interfaces makes them targets for constant scanning and brute-force attacks.
Today, we’ll explore a powerful yet lesser-known technique that significantly improves the security of your MikroTik (and not only): Port Knocking. It’s not just about “closing ports,” but a smart system that makes your services invisible to most scanners and bots.
July 15, 2025
We’ve already looked at Munin for basic insights and Prometheus + Grafana for cloud environments. Now let’s turn to Zabbix — a powerful, versatile, and scalable monitoring system that offers a comprehensive out-of-the-box solution for medium and large infrastructures. Zabbix is often chosen by organizations needing centralized monitoring, flexible alerting, and a wide range of data collection methods.
What Is Zabbix and How Does It Work?
Zabbix is a mature open-source monitoring system designed to track the state and performance of various IT components: servers, virtual machines, network devices, databases, web services, and applications.
July 14, 2025
We’ve reviewed Munin as a simple solution for basic monitoring. Now let’s move on to a stack that has become an indispensable tool in the world of modern cloud infrastructure, microservices, and containers: Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Grafana. This trio provides a powerful, flexible, and scalable approach to collecting, storing, analyzing, and visualizing metrics.
What is Prometheus and Its Ecosystem?
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system originally developed at Google and later handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Its key feature is the “pull” model: Prometheus scrapes metrics from targets via HTTP endpoints.
July 13, 2025
After our introductory journey into the world of monitoring, it’s time to explore specific tools. Let’s start with one of the oldest yet still relevant solutions for those who value simplicity and clarity — Munin.
Munin is a lightweight and intuitive monitoring system specializing in collecting and graphically presenting system data. If you need a quick way to get a general view of your servers’ health without diving deep into complex configurations, Munin might be a great place to start.
July 12, 2025
In today’s world, where digital technologies penetrate every sphere of life, the stable operation of IT infrastructure is not just a desirable condition — it is a critical necessity. Whether it’s a small website, a large online store, a mobile application, or an internal corporate system — any failure can lead to serious losses, reputational damage, and user dissatisfaction. This is where monitoring steps in.
What is Monitoring and Why Is It Important?
Monitoring in IT is the continuous collection, analysis, and visualization of data about the state and performance of infrastructure, applications, and services. Imagine you have a complex machine, like a car. To keep it running smoothly, you regularly check fuel level, oil, tire pressure. Monitoring serves the same purpose for servers, databases, networks, and applications.
