On paper, it’s not the most straightforward combination. MongoDB hasn’t officially blessed Debian 13 yet, so you don’t just copy a line from the docs and call it a day. You have to be a little more deliberate, use the Debian 12 (bookworm) repository, add the key properly, let apt complain once, then teach it… Continue reading
It started as something simple. I wanted to connect to one of my sandbox servers, just a temporary environment for testing some code and running quick database experiments. I didn’t want to bother setting up a WireGuard tunnel or a private VPN, so I took a shortcut. I used Surfshark, a public VPN service that… Continue reading
There are many ways to move a PostgreSQL database between servers, but for a production-grade setup,where roles already exist and you simply want to migrate one database cleanly, the safest path is to create the target database first and restore into it. This approach keeps ownerships and permissions consistent, avoids overwriting roles, and works perfectly… Continue reading
A few days after setting up my simple firewall with ferm on Debian 12, everything seemed perfect. The host was quiet, the rules were clean, and I finally had a minimal setup that did exactly what I wanted, blocking everything inbound, keeping outbound open, and allowing SSH only from the local LAN. It worked flawlessly,… Continue reading
There are many ways to configure a firewall in Linux. Some people prefer ufw, others go straight to iptables or nftables. But in between those layers of complexity, there’s a small, quiet tool that often goes unnoticed: Ferm, For Easy Rule Making. The name says it all. I like Ferm because it doesn’t try to… Continue reading
In continuous integration environments, it’s often necessary to run Jenkins agents or scripts securely under a dedicated system account. On Debian 12, this means creating a non-interactive user, one that can authenticate via SSH keys but cannot log in interactively or hold a password. This guide walks through setting up a minimal, hardened Jenkins user… Continue reading
Redash remains one of the most approachable open-source tools for building dashboards, sharing SQL queries, and collaborating on data. While the project is no longer actively maintained upstream, the community builds (10.x) are still widely used for internal analytics. In this article, I’ll show how to bring up Redash quickly on Debian 12 using Docker… Continue reading
It happened to me on a quiet evening, running the usual sudo apt update on a Debian 12 server that powers Grafana for dashboards I rely on daily. Instead of the usual green lines of updates, I was greeted by a red warning. For a moment, it looked like the repository had gone bad, but… Continue reading
WireGuard is often chosen because it’s modern, lightweight, and fast compared to older VPN protocols. Its codebase is much smaller than OpenVPN or IPsec, which makes it easier to audit and maintain, reducing the risk of hidden vulnerabilities. This simplicity also translates to better performance with lower latency and faster connection times. Another reason to… Continue reading
If you’ve been working with Debian 12, chances are you’ve already used tar or zip for packaging files. They work fine, but when you need smaller archives and stronger protection, nothing beats 7-Zip. The .7z format not only compresses better, it also supports AES-256 encryption and can even hide file names. This guide will walk… Continue reading