Linux

It’s 3 A.M. PagerDuty is screaming, the error rate graph looks like a hockey stick, and your Java service is dying. You have SSH, a shell, and about ten minutes before someone important wakes up. This is the triage ladder I actually run, in order, with the exact one-liners. The order matters: every step rules out a class of problem before you spend time on the next one. If you did the hardening from the Linux Server Setup post, this is its companion — that one was pre-incident, this one is during. ...

Every fresh VPS (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, your homelab Proxmox box) boots up with the same problem: a root login over password, no firewall, and nothing installed. Before you deploy anything, spend 15 minutes on this checklist. Order matters. Firewall rules and SSH hardening can lock you out permanently if done in the wrong sequence. Do the steps in this order and you won’t have to rescue-boot your way back in. 1. Update everything first Connect as root and patch the box before touching anything else. ...