About

Uplink Notes is a one-person publication about the practical side of running small servers: the tuning knobs that matter, the monitoring that is worth its disk space, and the operational habits that prevent 3 a.m. surprises.

The test bench is deliberately unglamorous — single-core virtual machines with a gigabyte of memory, the kind of hardware most personal projects and small services actually run on. Advice that only works on bare metal with 10 GbE interfaces is not much use here, so every claim on this site was verified on modest kit before it was written up.

What you will find

Long-form notes on TCP and kernel network tuning, storage and memory behaviour on small instances, SSH and service hardening, and post-mortems when something breaks. Articles appear irregularly, when a result is solid enough to stand behind.

Contact

Corrections and questions are welcome. The fastest route is the issue tracker of the public notes repository, where the source of this site also lives. Please include the kernel version and a packet capture or a measurement when reporting that a tuning result does not reproduce — most discrepancies turn out to be path differences, and the numbers help everyone.