Claude Code is Anthropic’s AI coding agent for the terminal. You launch it inside a project directory, describe what you want in plain language, and it reads your code, edits files, and runs commands to get there. This guide covers installation on Debian (and Ubuntu) as well as Enterprise Linux distributions such as RHEL, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Fedora. Requirements…
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This guide shows how to issue and automatically renew a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for an Apache website running directly on an EC2 instance with Amazon Linux 2023, without a load balancer. Example domain used in this walkthrough: example.com Prerequisites Before starting, confirm the following: The EC2 security group allows inbound traffic on ports 80 and 443. The domain’s DNS…
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There’s a ritual every VPS owner knows. New server comes online, and before anything else, you paste in a one-liner from a forum post — bench.sh, vpsbench, one of their many mutations — and pipe a shell script you’ve never read straight into bash to find out whether your new host oversold you. The results are useful. The tradition of…
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How to Reset a Forgotten iDRAC Password from the Command Line If you run Dell PowerEdge servers at home — and the used-server market has put an R720 or R730 in a lot of homelabs — sooner or later you’ll face this one: the server is running fine, you can SSH into the OS all day long, but the iDRAC…
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Here’s a project that scratches two itches at once: the practical need for a decent web interface on a file server, and my collector’s fondness for keeping old formats alive. FileLight is a single-file PHP directory browser with a modern UI — grid and list views, dark mode, search, sortable columns, image previews — and its signature feature is inline…
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The self-hosted dashboard world has gotten heavy. The popular options are genuinely impressive — Dashy, Homepage, Heimdall — but they want a Docker container, a Node build chain, or a running web application just to show you a page of links. Somewhere along the way, “a landing page for my homelab” turned into another service to maintain. tinyhome-py is my…
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Every homelabber and small-ops admin knows the moment: you browse to one of your own services and get slapped with a full-screen certificate warning. The cert expired three days ago. Nothing told you. Now you’re renewing it under pressure instead of on a schedule. I got tired of that moment, so I built TrustView — a lightweight, self-hosted dashboard that…
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Regular readers know I have a soft spot for restoration projects. Usually that means a creased instruction manual, a worn 78rpm label, or a database that hasn’t been opened since 2007. This time, the restoration project was software: Kevin Roth’s original 2013 PHP Pick ‘Em, the free web application that let anyone self-host a weekly NFL football pool. The original…
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Debian 12 (Bookworm) → Debian 13 (Trixie) Upgrade Guide Debian 13 “Trixie” has been stable since August 9, 2025. It ships kernel 6.12 LTS, Python 3.13, GCC 14.2, and is supported until 2028 (LTS to 2030). Debian 12 is now oldstable. Only the 12 → 13 jump is supported. There is no clean downgrade path back to bookworm — recovery…
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Notes on setting up and managing Python virtual environments on Debian 12 (bookworm), including what to do with a venv copied from another machine. System Python Debian 12 ships Python 3.11 as the system Python. There is no python3.12 package in the bookworm repos (3.12 arrives with Debian 13). python3 –version # Python 3.11.x Copied Venvs Don’t Work If a…
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WordPress generates a small mountain of image files over the years — originals, plus a thumbnail for every registered image size. Before (or after) cleaning up the sprawl, it pays to compress what you keep. Here’s the toolset for PNG and JPG on the command line, covering both Debian and Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL/Alma/Rocky). PNG Tools Several tools, two categories:…
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The Problem An Intel NUC running Debian 13 had been playing music continuously for weeks without issue. One morning the music stopped. A reboot did not restore audio — the system came up normally, but no sound played. Environment Intel NUC, Realtek ALC283 codec (HDA Intel PCH), analog output + 3 HDMI outputs Debian 13 with LightDM and a desktop…
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A long-running app server was sitting on nearly 2 GB of swap with a swappiness of only 30. Nothing felt slow, but the number looked wrong. This is a walkthrough of how I traced it from “the swap looks full” to a concrete one-line fix in the service definition — and a reminder that resident memory only tells you half…
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Symptoms New SSH connections hang immediately after the TCP connection is established. The client shows the connection open and then stalls before the server banner (e.g. stops right after Local version string … with ssh -vvv). The same hang occurs over loopback (ssh user@127.0.0.1), confirming the problem is local to the host, not the network or the client. sshd logs…
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Modernizing a Legacy WordPress Database to InnoDB and utf8mb4 Many long‑running WordPress sites still use a mix of MyISAM tables and legacy charsets such as utf8/utf8mb3 or even latin1_swedish_ci. Updating these to InnoDB and utf8mb4 improves reliability, Unicode/emoji support, and consistency across environments. This article describes a practical, repeatable process using a sample database named example, but the same steps…
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Using NVM (Recommended for Developers) Node Version Manager (NVM) lets you install and switch between multiple versions of Node.js and npm on the same machine — useful when different projects require different Node versions. Download and run the NVM installation script: curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.1/install.sh | bash Apply the changes to your current shell session: source ~/.bashrc Install the latest Long-Term…
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There are a couple of valid methods, but don’t do what I did and mix them. If you install Duo two-factor authentication for Unix systems. There are four files that are needed and differ in the approach on how they are installed pending on the path you had taken. Once again, I stress, don’t mix them. The four files, pam_duo.so,…
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