ShieldedBytes

On a busy home‑lab or a small office server, the first thing you notice when ping myapp.local suddenly fails is that systemd‑resolved has stopped resolving the name. The culprit is almost always a mis‑configured or stale entry in /etc/hosts. This post walks through a systematic hunt, shows how to keep the file tidy, and highlights security implications of host‑name resolution.

Why /etc/hosts still matters

systemd‑resolved reads /etc/hosts before querying DNS. It treats the file as a local override list, so any line that matches a query will short‑circuit DNS. That design is handy for internal services, but it also means that a stray duplicate or a typo can silently break name resolution for the whole system.

Persisting a Rootless Podman Home Assistant Without a Registry

Running Home Assistant in a rootless Podman container feels like a no‑frills, privilege‑minimal setup that sits comfortably in a homelab. The real pain point is making sure the image and its data stick around after a reboot when you don’t want to hit a Docker‑compatible registry. The trick is to treat a small part of the local filesystem as a “registry” and let Podman pull from it every time the system boots.

The Problem: Docker’s Verbose Journal Entries

When Docker runs on a modern Linux distro, every container start, stop, or health‑check event is logged by the Docker daemon (dockerd). Those logs are forwarded to systemd‑journal, which is great for auditability but can quickly flood the journal with repetitive, low‑value messages. On a busy host a single day of activity can generate several megabytes of journal data, making it hard to spot real issues and bumping disk usage.

Orphaned Swap Files on a 2 GB VPS – How to Spot, Clean, and Harden

A 2 GB VPS is a tight budget. Every megabyte counts, and swap files that never get freed can silently eat the space you need for logs, containers, or backups. This post walks through how to find those orphaned swap files, safely remove them, and set up a swap strategy that keeps the system lean and secure.

Silent NFS Export Leaks on Home NAS

Running a lightweight NFS server on a Raspberry Pi or a small Ubuntu Server is a common way to share media or backups.
The problem? A mis‑configured export table can let a client mount a directory that was never meant to be exposed. The server happily replies “yes”, so the admin might not notice until a log entry pops up or a backup job starts to fail.

Why Rootless Containers Still Need Guardrails

Running containers as a non‑root user is a solid first line of defense, but it’s not a silver bullet. A mis‑configured image, a vulnerable app, or a simple oversight can still let a container touch /etc, /var, or even your own home directory. This post walks through the hardening steps that keep file writes strictly inside a rootless runtime’s writable layer.

1. The Rootless Model in 2026

Rootless mode is all about user namespaces. The container’s root (uid 0) gets mapped to a non‑root UID on the host, and the kernel enforces that the process can only see files that belong to that UID. The catch is that the mapping is per‑process, not per‑filesystem. If a container mounts a host directory or a volume, the process inside can write to it unless the mount options explicitly deny it.

Why split DNS between interfaces?

When a machine plugs into a VPN it usually needs to look up hostnames that live only inside that tunnel.
If you let the whole system talk to the same nameserver, two things can go wrong:

• The VPN’s DNS might not be reachable until the tunnel is up, so internal lookups fail.
• Public resolvers get handed internal queries, leaking sensitive names to the outside world.

Binding a dedicated DNS server to the VPN link keeps the resolver stack tidy, cuts the attack surface, and stops accidental leaks.

A One‑Command Escape from Emergency Mode

When a typo in /etc/fstab stops the root filesystem from mounting, Ubuntu 24.04 drops straight into emergency mode. You get a read‑only root shell, but that’s not useful because you can’t edit the offending line—root is already mounted read‑only. The usual fix is to reboot, pull out a live USB, and patch the file from there.
There’s a much quicker way that keeps you on the same machine, preserves the state, and lets you fix the problem in place.

ACLs for log‑only access

When you need a user to read system logs but you don’t want to give them sudo or pull them into a privileged group, POSIX ACLs are the cleanest way to do it.
They let you hand out read rights on a per‑file or per‑directory basis, and you can set defaults so that every new file inherits the same restrictions.

A backup account that pulls logs to an off‑site archive but never touches the live system is the classic case. ACLs keep the principle of least privilege intact while still letting the job run unattended.

Rootless Podman on a Raspberry Pi – Solving the “Cannot Bind Mount /home/user/data” Permission Issue
The Raspberry Pi has become a favorite platform for home‑lab enthusiasts, and Podman’s rootless mode lets you run containers without granting the container process full system privileges.
On a Pi running Raspberry OS Bookworm (Debian 12), a common stumbling block is the error

Error: cannot bind mount /home/user/data: permission denied

when you try to persist data with -v /home/user/data:/data.
Below is a step‑by‑step guide that explains why the error happens, how to fix it, and what security trade‑offs you should be aware of.