Blesta: Not Everything Should Be Vibe Coded. Apparently, Security Reports Can Be Vibe Ignored.
A WHMCS refugee, two AI assistants, 32 security findings, twelve matching code fixes, and a support ticket that has apparently taken a vow of silence.
Sysadmin Horror Stories
The ones that went sideways first. Long-form war stories from production, with the fixes that eventually worked.
Enabling SELinux on a Server That Had It Disabled for Years — And Somehow Nothing Broke
A real-world AlmaLinux 10 SELinux migration from fully disabled to enforcing on a server running Apache, Remi PHP-FPM, BookStack, a Laravel controller, MariaDB, custom SSH port 65535, cron jobs and custom writable paths — with troubleshooting commands and a practical SELinux cheatsheet.
Updating a Forgotten BookStack: 15 Months, 1,371 Files and a Unix User That Didn’t Exist
A real-world BookStack upgrade from v25.02.2 to v26.05.3: service-account Git ownership, runuser, backups, Composer/PHP version mismatches, Laravel migrations, writable storage, and the checks that tell you the upgrade actually worked.
AlmaLinux 8 → 9 → 10 with ELevate: The Upgrade That Actually Worked
A real-world, step-by-step AlmaLinux 8 → 9 → 10 in-place upgrade guide using ELevate: backups, Leapp inhibitors, VDO checks, NetworkManager migration, third-party packages, MariaDB, old EL packages, and the post-upgrade cleanup nobody tells you about.
AlmaLinux 10: Dual EFI + mdadm RAID1 on Bare Metal (or: How I Spent My Friday Evening Arguing With a Boot Loader)
Introduction, or “What Could Possibly Go Wrong” So you have a perfectly good server. Two perfectly good SATA SSDs. A perfectly reasonable desire to mirror them so that when one inevitably dies at 3am on a Sunday, your server keeps running. You’ve done this a hundred times. mdadm, RAID1, /boot on the array, done, beer, … Read more
I Taught an AI to Read My Analytics. Then It Started Doing My Marketing.
“Wait, can you even do that?” It started, as the best bad ideas do, with a question I didn’t expect a real answer to. I’d been hearing about MCP — the Model Context Protocol, the thing that lets an AI assistant actually talk to your stuff instead of just hallucinating about it. And I had … Read more
CVE-2026-41940: The 64-Day Backdoor Into the Internet’s Control Plane
A critical authentication bypass in cPanel & WHM gave attackers root access to over a million publicly exposed servers — silently, without a password, defeating two-factor authentication — for sixty-four days before anyone patched a thing. What Was Actually at Stake cPanel and WHM are not just web applications. They are the administrative nervous system … Read more
Ubuntu 24.04 & RAID1 EFI: A Comedy of Errors
Sysadmin Horror Stories — Vol. 1 Ubuntu 24.04 & RAID1 EFI: A Comedy of Errors Platform: AMD AM5 / B650 Disks: 2× Samsung 960GB SATA SSD Mood: Progressively deteriorating A completely true account of what happens when you try to do something perfectly reasonable — installing Ubuntu Server 24.04 on a proper software RAID1 … Read more