Your uptime monitor should log in, not just ping
The claim A monitor that fetches your homepage and checks for a 200 status confirms the least useful thing about your business: that a web server is running. The failures that cost...
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Infrastructure
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
Turn off SSH passwords and the botnets lose interest
The claim Every public SSH port on the internet receives thousands of password guesses a day within hours of coming online. The standard responses — moving the port, installing fai...
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If it matters, systemd should be the thing starting it
The claim Every long-running process on a production Linux host should be a systemd unit. Not pm2, not a screen session someone detached from in the spring, not nohup & in a deploy...
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A staging environment unlike production proves nothing
The claim Most staging environments differ from production in ways that guarantee they cannot catch the failures people expect them to catch: a smaller database, different configur...
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Your domain registrar is your single point of failure
The claim Businesses spend real money on redundant servers, replicated databases and multi-region backups, then protect the domain name that points at all of it with a shared passw...
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One second of micro-caching absorbs a traffic spike
The claim Caching a dynamic page for one second sounds pointless. It is the single highest-leverage configuration change available to a small site, because it converts an unbounded...
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Four alerts that wake someone up, and nothing else
The claim If more than four conditions in your system are permitted to page a human at three in the morning, none of them will be taken seriously by March. Alert fatigue is not a d...
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DMARC at p=none is not email authentication
The claim A published DMARC record with a policy of none protects nobody. It asks receiving mail servers to report on forged mail and then deliver it anyway. Most Canadian business...
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A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis
The claim Backup coverage is the wrong metric. The only number that describes your actual risk is the elapsed time of your last successful, verified restore into a clean environmen...
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