Rich Gibbs
Practical, opinionated notes on Linux server security, AWS hygiene, and indie-founder operations from Rich Gibbs.
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Cutover notes: RHEL VM, a flipped transfer, and a missing compiler
Notes from an overnight session moving the last agent off its old AWS host — rebuild the runtime instead of copying it, flip the SSH direction when it fights back, and treat a reboot plus a real message round-trip as the only proof that a cutover worked.
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Deleting 4 GB Left the Backup at 7.5 GB: TRIM and a Guarded Prune
An 11 GB VM kept producing 7.5 GB nightly backups after 4 GB of deletions. Deleting files only de-indexes them; the fix was TRIM on the virtual disks, plus a prune that can't empty the bucket on a failed night.
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The Backup Grew, the Visible Folders Didn't Add Up
A whole-VM dump went 4.8 GB, 6.2 GB, 7.3 GB on three consecutive nights, so I followed disk usage down the tree: the two du flags that made the numbers trustworthy, the ~2.5 GB stale application copy the descent turned up, and the home-tree total that never matched the folders I could see.
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It Was the e1000e Driver, Not the Cable
About a week of roughly daily outages on the Proxmox host, blamed on a failing ethernet cable because reseating it always worked, until the kernel log showed a driver hang repeating every two seconds.
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The Wrong Fix, the Hidden Files, and the Reboot That Proved It
Why telling the hypervisor to skip a folder doesn't work for a virtual machine, why mounting a new disk hid 1.7 GB of archives without freeing the space, and what the reboot test was actually for.
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The Backup Runs, the Restore Is Still Untested
Three 403s with three different causes while wiring rclone to an S3-compatible bucket, a Proxmox backup job that runs in about a minute, and the restore test still not done.
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Verify the Way In Before You Close It
A session where a fix I had marked closed still had one switch on, why offsite backups went to object storage instead of a drive, and what I deliberately left unproven.
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One Loose Cable, Two Hidden Start Paths
Two faults from one homelab session: a marginal ethernet cable that impersonated a name-resolution outage, and a service that was already disabled but still had a start path left open.
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Recreating an Old Account Name Beat Rewriting 20,062 Paths
The first homelab VM, Docker from the official repo, and pulling a self-hosted agent tree off AWS: the migration trap of twenty thousand hardcoded home paths, why RAM is reserved while vCPUs are shared, and why a disk grow has to wait for a partition-order check.
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Proxmox VE 9.2 install status
On 2026-07-15 I recorded a successful Proxmox VE 9.2 install to NVMe, with a temporary network and a new router on the way.