Dell R720 vs HP DL380 G9: Used Server Knife Fight
Dell R720 or HP DL380 G9 for your home lab? We compare CPU generation, power draw, fan noise levels, iDRAC vs iLO, and which used pizza box wins the fight.
Tag: linux
All the articles with the tag "linux".
ddrescue vs TestDisk vs PhotoRec
Drive is dying. Which tool do you reach for? ddrescue clones, TestDisk repairs partitions, PhotoRec carves files. They're a workflow, not rivals.
Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.
KVM/QEMU/libvirt: CLI Workflows
virt-manager is fine, but real homelab automation lives on the command line. virt-install, virsh, cloud-init — provision VMs in seconds, not click-by-click.
fd vs find: Rust Speed vs POSIX Power
fd has sane defaults, parallel walking, and respects .gitignore. find is gnarly but ships everywhere. Here's when each one wins.
Linux Namespaces from Scratch
Containers are just namespaces and cgroups in a trench coat. Build one yourself with unshare and nsenter — no Docker required. Demystifies what actually happens.
rclone vs Restic: Sync vs Backup
rclone copies and syncs files to cloud storage. Restic does deduplicated encrypted snapshots. Confusing them costs you restores at 2 AM.
mtr vs traceroute: Packet Loss
traceroute lies. mtr tells the truth. Here's how to read packet-loss reports like an oncall engineer and stop blaming your ISP for the wrong hop.
ZFS Encryption vs LUKS
Native ZFS dataset encryption vs LUKS under your pool — which layer to encrypt at, performance trade-offs, key management, and raw send/recv.
iperf3 + nload: Network Diagnosis
Your gigabit link drops to 200 Mbps and you don't know why. iperf3 measures throughput honestly, nload visualizes traffic — together they find the bottleneck fast.
SMART Disk Monitoring with smartmontools
Disks fail. SMART tells you when. Here's how smartctl and smartd actually predict failure, and the attributes that matter (most don't).
fio: Real Disk Benchmarking
Stop trusting marketing IOPS numbers. fio measures what your disk actually does on your workload — sequential, random, mixed. Here's how to read the output honestly.