RE: https://fosstodon.org/@brianb/115984283483440526

HAND WRITING IS A LEARNING TECHNOLOGY
we are already seeing the cognitive differences among Millennials & Zoomers who never learned to write properly by hand & those who did.

a notebook is the most basic of knowledge management systems. it can be:

- an archive
- a backup
- a reference
- an idea lab
- a gaming platform
- a collaborative project
- a canvas

but from a #devops #sysadmin POV, a notebook is an important form of REDUNDANCY. you can't brick a 3-ring binder or phish notes in a safe.

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/115984116493117731

Luckily, many of my clients are intelligent and well-prepared people. Needless to say, that email, before making me laugh, had already made the client laugh. He immediately thought he was dealing with people who were great at marketing but had little technical skill.
I presented my theory on software engineering, but he immediately tore it apart, declaring himself extremely skeptical. In his opinion, it is more likely to be a technique to lower our defenses and then try to sell us "security products" after a "pentest full of flaws". Or simply sheer incompetence.

Anyway, their connection hasn't any open ports. So they can pentest anything they want to, as long as they want to.

#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories #PenTest

Self-Host Weekly (30 January 2026)

#AI tags (and the #lobster everyone is going crazy over), software updates and launches, a spotlight on #VanillaCookbook - a simple #recipe platform, and more in this week's #selfhosted recap!

https://selfh.st/weekly/2026-01-30/

#selfhost #selfhosting #newsletter #foss #opensource #fosdem #homelab #privacy #security #sysadmin #devops #smarthome #fediverse #clawdbot #moltbot #openclaw #immich

This one beats them all and it’s going to make me laugh until tonight:

“I’ve been assigned to carry out a penetration test on a server you manage. The test will be performed from the outside, since the perimeter security needs to be assessed. In order to perform the test, I therefore ask you to disable any firewall, protection, blacklist. If any of these are in place, the server might not be reachable and could prevent the assessment.”

I had to read it three times just to make sure I’d understood it properly.

#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories

Reducing unwanted traffic with #fail2ban
Helps just to a certain degreee, but better than nothing: https://gist.github.com/dale3h/660fe549df8232d1902f338e6d3b39ed

added some user agents i found from #openai #claude and other AI data crawlers. After one request, they get blocked for 7 days:
`|openai|open\.ai|Perplexity|OAI-SearchBot|ClaudeBot|Petalbot`

Am I missing some?

#sysadmin #nginx #aislop