Expert tutorials, guides, and tips on Linux, DevOps, and IT Administration
A focused, eight-volume curriculum that teaches absolute beginners the Linux skills that actually matter — the command line, files, scripts, packages, networking, monitoring, security, and the daily work of administration. One volume per concept, in order, with no jargon and no detours....
A practical, opinionated 2026 roadmap to take you from "I have never opened a terminal" to "I run hardened Linux servers in production." Eight books, three stages, one straight line — and a study schedule you can actually finish in twelve weeks....
Explore the complete Dargslan open-source IT ecosystem: 120 Linux PyPI packages, 119 Windows Python CLI tools, 120 PowerShell modules on PSGallery, and organized GitHub repositories. Free, professional-grade tools for sysadmins, DevOps engineers, and cybersecurity professionals....
Most Linux administrators inherit systemd unit files written by someone else and never write one from scratch. This step-by-step tutorial fixes that — building a real service unit from blank file to production-ready, covering the directives that matter, the sandboxing options every modern unit should include, how to debug with journalctl, and how to add a timer companion for scheduled execution....
Tailscale, raw WireGuard, and ZeroTier are the three serious mesh VPN options for 2026. They overlap heavily but differ in NAT traversal strategy, control-plane model, performance characteristics, and self-hosting story. This honest comparison covers real-world performance, the ACL story, the open-source vs commercial trade-offs, and which tool fits which scenario....
The ss command has long since replaced netstat as the right tool for socket inspection on Linux, but most administrators only know the basic forms. This is a practical reference of ten ss patterns that solve real incidents — finding what is listening on a port, identifying which process owns a socket, debugging connection-state queues during a load spike, and the formatting tricks that make ss output actually readable....
Windows Server 2025 brings hotpatching to general-purpose deployments — security updates that apply without reboot, dramatically reducing maintenance windows. This is a practical guide to how it actually works in 2026: the enrollment process, the baseline-and-hotpatch cycle, which workloads benefit most, the licensing cost (it is now a paid Azure Arc subscription), the limitations, and the rollout strategy that makes the math work for typical enterprises....
Caddy 2, Nginx, and HAProxy are the three serious open-source reverse proxies in 2026. They overlap heavily but differ in TLS automation, configuration model, performance characteristics, and operational ergonomics. This honest comparison covers real benchmarks, the TLS-and-ACME story, observability options, and which tool fits which use case — so you can pick a proxy that fits your team and your traffic profile....
Restic, BorgBackup, and Kopia are the three serious open-source choices for Linux backups in 2026. They overlap heavily but differ in deduplication strategy, repository format, cloud support, and operational ergonomics. This honest comparison covers real benchmarks for backup speed and restore performance, the encryption story, the cloud-storage story, and which tool fits which workload — so you can pick once and stop second-guessing....
Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana are the three open-source pieces every modern observability stack is built around in 2026. This is a practical setup guide that covers the architecture decisions that matter (single-binary vs microservices, retention strategy, federation), sizing rules of thumb based on real deployments, the alerting patterns that catch real problems, and the operational gotchas that bite teams once they hit a few hundred services....
PostgreSQL 17 brings the most significant logical replication improvements since the feature was introduced — failover slots, bidirectional replication scaffolding, and dramatically better DDL handling. This is a production-ready walkthrough: publication and subscription setup, conflict handling that does not surprise you, monitoring that catches replication lag before it cascades, and the failover and switchover patterns that work in real environments....
Mini PCs in 2026 are powerful enough to run a real Proxmox cluster — three nodes for proper quorum, with HA failover and shared storage, all under €1500 total and pulling less power than a single tower workstation. This is a practical hardware and software guide based on a year of running this setup at home: what to buy, how to network it, where Ceph makes sense (and where it really does not), and the operational lessons learned from real failures....
Welcome to the Dargslan Tech Blog — long-form, hands-on articles for engineers who run real systems in production. We publish every week on Linux administration, DevOps tooling, cloud architecture, cybersecurity, Python automation, Windows Server, and the practical day-to-day skills that separate junior sysadmins from senior platform engineers. Every post is written by working professionals, includes copy-pasteable code and configuration files, and is updated whenever upstream tools release breaking changes.
There is no shortage of tech blogs on the internet, but most fall into one of two traps: shallow listicles written by people who have never touched the tools, or 30-page corporate whitepapers designed to sell a product. Our articles sit in the middle — long enough to actually solve your problem, short enough to read with a coffee, and always grounded in working examples you can run in your own terminal. We don't write filler, we don't gate content behind email forms, and we never publish AI-generated slop without expert review.
Our writers come from a sysadmin, SRE, and DevOps background and have shipped production systems for fintech, healthcare, telco, and SaaS companies across Europe and North America. When you read a tutorial here, you're reading what someone actually did at 2am during an incident — not a sanitized vendor case study.
Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow the tech news section, or grab the daily IT tip for a steady stream of practical knowledge. If long-form learning is more your style, our companion eBook library covers every topic from this blog in 200-500 page depth, with downloadable code repositories and lifetime updates.