Category Archives: Troubleshooting

Various problems solutions

AWS: Basic Infrastructure Setup for WordPress
0 (0)

15 March 2026

It’s time for a major server upgrade for RTFM, which I usually do by migrating to a new server – because I also do various other upgrades along the way, like upgrading the PHP version or even migrating to a different cloud. This time I’m planning to move from DigitalOcean, where RTFM has been hosted… Read More »

Loading

FreeBSD: Home NAS, Part 15: Automating Backups – scripts, rsync, rclone
0 (0)

15 March 2026

This is essentially the last major task – setting up automated backup creation. In the post FreeBSD: Home NAS, Part 13: Planning Data Storage and Backups I described the general idea in more detail – what gets backed up, where, what gets stored and how – and today is the purely technical part about the actual… Read More »

Loading

MikroTik: WireGuard VPN Setup and Linux Peer Configuration
0 (0)

14 March 2026

Another one of the many nice features of MikroTik – built-in WireGuard support (although even cheap TP-Link Archers have it). In my setup, the MikroTik RB4011 acts as a “VPN Hub” – all clients connect to it and are united into a single network, and the role of VPN is slightly exaggerated is genuinely important… Read More »

Loading

Raspberry Pi: first experience and installation of Raspberry Pi OS Lite
0 (0)

13 March 2026

For those who don’t follow updates in the Telegram channel rtfmcoua or are visiting my blog for the first time, a reminder that for the last couple of months I’ve been building a “self-hosted home stack”, which already includes a couple of MikroTik devices and a ThinkCentre running FreeBSD. On the ThinkCentre / FreeBSD I… Read More »

Loading

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 10 – monitoring with VictoriaMetrics and Grafana
3.8 (6)

7 February 2026

Finally got around to monitoring. I was interested in running a standard stack with VictoriaMetrics + Grafana + Alertmanager not in the usual Kubernetes with a Helm chart, but simply on the host. However, the approach is the same as monitoring services in AWS/Kubernetes – on FreeBSD, we will have VictoriaMetrics for metrics, Grafana for… Read More »

Loading

Arch Linux: “mysterious” DNS timeouts and “in search of the Ethernet truth”
5 (1)

20 January 2026

For a couple of months now, my work laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 running Arch Linux, has been having trouble opening new websites – for the first 10-15 seconds, the site loads in “pieces”, for example: But then it “wakes up”, and everything starts working perfectly: Finally, when I started setting up a… Read More »

Loading

TCP/IP: SYN flood attack on the RTFM server, and “Hacker News hug of death”
0 (0)

2 January 2026

Got an alert from the monitoring system this morning, indicating that the blog is down: Well, I thought: another one DDoS, not the first time. Investigating the issue I went to the Cloudflare admin, enabled the Under Attack Mode, and started the investigation. Checked the requests: I think, okay, it’s simple – requests are coming… Read More »

Loading

SSH: sshd hardening on FreeBSD and Linux, and 1Password integration
4 (1)

29 December 2025

It is time to tidy up SSH on FreeBSD itself and on the clients – laptops running Arch Linux, as I am still using password authentication on my home machines. Actually, the settings described below are specific neither to FreeBSD nor to Linux, as the SSH server is the same on all systems (OpenSSH_9.9p2 on… Read More »

Loading

Arch Linux: pacman -Syu and “Failed to connect to system scope bus via local transport” errors
0 (0)

29 December 2025

Problems with upgrades on Arch Linux are very rare, and a situation like today’s is a first for me in nearly 10 years of using the system. So, what happened: installed upgrades with pacman -Syu after installation, sudo reboot would hang managed to reboot only with sudo reboot -f (force) after the reboot – X.Org… Read More »

Loading