A while back (2020), I published an article on How to Structure a Go Command-Line Project. Within that article, I stated that while there are many recommendations on structuring Go Projects, there is no set standard. The lack of a standard causes many new Gophers to question the best way…

Note: This is a republish of a 2014 article (cleaned up a bit with ChatGPT). I am moving my old content to Medium, so forgive any dated material. In this article, we’ll delve into tcpdump, a tool that people either master completely or use with basic knowledge, often referring to…

Note: This is a republish of a blog post from 2012 (clean up via ChatGPT). Sorry for the dated content; moving old posts to Medium. In specific testing scenarios, such as simulating a Wide Area Network (WAN) environment, it becomes necessary to introduce artificial network latency. …

Note: This article is a republish of a 2013 post (cleaned up by ChatGPT). I am migrating my old content to Medium; forgive the dated material. While troubleshooting an application’s failure to retain the umask setting specified in the root user’s profile or /etc/profile, I discovered something intriguing. …

Note: This article is a republish of a 2013 blog post; I am moving content to medium to take down my old blog. Medium doesn’t support backdating… Forgive the dated material. As a sysadmin, knowing your tools is crucial, and one of the first that comes to mind is nmap…

I’m a big fan of testing; it is a critical part of software engineering and how reliable software gets built. I am also a big fan of making tests easier to manage and maintain. …

The net package in the Go standard library abstracts away many low-level networking details, making it easy for Go developers to create complex applications. However, the standard library can confuse developers who want to explore more advanced networking features like setting socket options on listeners. Today’s article is going to…

Graceful shutdown is vital to building highly resilient systems in a cloud-native environment. When we build cloud-native applications that follow the “cattle and not pets” philosophy, creating and destroying instances of applications is standard operating procedure. This article will discuss why it’s important to implement graceful shutdown mechanisms and how…

A standard performance tuning recommendation for distributed systems running on Linux is to adjust the tcp_rmem and tcp_wmem Kernel tunables. But what are these? Why are they important? How do they work? In today's article, we are going to explore the tcp_rmem (Receive Buffer) and tcp_wmem (Send Buffer) work and…