Sysadmin Posts


Overkilling Website Performance

Given the recent series of issues with Google Cloud, I decided it was time to jump ship and look at other providers for this blog (and eventually the rest of my sites most likely).

CSAW War Stories

While writing up my recent post about debugging a problem with CSAW CTF’s website this year, I remembered this post which I started writing about a year ago documenting all of the “fun” stories I have from running CTF over the past 4 years.

Debugging in Production

If you competed in this year’s CSAW CTF, you may have noticed that the site was pretty sluggish until around 1am EST Sunday. This post is a walkthrough of how I went from noticing this sluggishness, to debugging the issue, to putting in a fix which decreased page load times by over 10x.

systemd's Predictable Network Interface Names

Today while setting up a new Proxmox node in my cluster, I ran into a “fun” issue.

CSAW CTF 2017 Infrastructure Overview

(Cross-posted from my entry in the OSIRIS Lab’s blog: https://blog.isis.poly.edu/2017/09/25/csaw-ctf-2017-infra/)