apps lab

Personal infrastructure notes — networks, automation, small services.

About

This is a small lab server where I keep personal services and experiments: self-hosted tooling, monitoring for a handful of machines, and notes written while keeping them alive. Nothing here is a product; it is a workbench.

Notes

2026-11-02
Backups that survive the machine — A backup is only real when the restore has been rehearsed. I keep weekly snapshots locally and mirror them off-site; the restore drill runs on a scratch VM, not on hope.

2026-10-19
Certificates without the babysitting — Wildcard issuance plus a symlink farm means one renewal quietly covers every subdomain. The trick was making the web server read through the symlink so renewals land without a reload dance.

2026-09-28
Quiet servers — Most alert fatigue is self-inflicted. My rule now: a monitor that fires without an action attached gets deleted, and routine health stays silent unless something a human must do has changed.

Elsewhere

Writing lives on my blog; code lives in private repos. This page exists so the domain has a front door.