Tagged: Debian
17 posts · browse all tags
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Why Your Traceroute Shows Packet Loss at Hop 2 and Why It Is Usually Fine
My ISP's second hop shows 250 ms and 30% loss in traceroute, mtr and trippy, while every hop after it is at 10 ms. Here is how to prove that the delay is in the router's replies and not in your traffic.
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Modern Linux Tools Part 7: The Verdict and an Install Script
Which of the modern Linux tools I would install on every machine, which ones I would keep for interactive use only, and a single script that installs all of them from apt on Debian 13.
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Modern Linux Tools Part 6: Data and Git With jq, gojq, delta, lazygit and tealdeer
jq against gojq, delta for git diffs, lazygit and tealdeer, tested on Debian 13. gojq is faster on a large file but sorts your keys, and Debian's yq is not the yq you expect.
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Modern Linux Tools Part 5: Network Diagnostics With gping, trippy and xh
gping against ping, trippy against mtr and traceroute, and xh against curl, tested on Debian 13. The best result is not a tool at all: it is what all three traceroute tools show about your ISP's second hop.
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Modern Linux Tools Part 4: Navigation and History With zoxide, fzf and atuin
zoxide against cd, fzf against Ctrl-R and grep, and atuin against shell history, tested on Debian 13. Where each one trips up, and the dependency atuin needs that Debian does not package.
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sshole: The OpenSSH Password Bypass, and Why Debian Is Not in Scope
OpenSSH 10.6p2 fixes a bug where a 257-byte password logs you in to an account with no password. It hits musl systems such as Alpine, not Debian. How it works, the Ansible check I ran on four Debian hosts, and the fix if you run Alpine.
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Modern Linux Tools Part 3: Search and Replace With ripgrep and sd
ripgrep against grep and sd against sed, tested on a 105,000-file tree and a 105 MB file on Debian 13. ripgrep wins on directory trees, grep still wins some single-file searches, and sd has one dangerous default.
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Modern Linux Tools Part 2: Files With eza, fd, bat, dust and duf
Five modern replacements for ls, find, cat, du and df, tested side by side on a 105,000-file tree on Debian 13. Where they win, where they lose, and the Debian packaging gotchas.
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Modern Linux Tools Part 1: Why Bother, and How I Tested
Start of a seven-part series testing modern replacements for ls, find, grep, cat and more on a clean Debian 13 VM. The test method, the ground rules and what to expect.
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After the Patch: Six Hosts, One Silent apt Failure, and an Upgrade Playbook I'm Keeping
My CVE-2026-98432 post said the fix was one apt command and a reboot. On a real homelab it took backups, a route that vanished on reboot, an apt run that reported success while fetching nothing, and a reusable Ansible playbook. I also had to prove the Proxmox kernel was really patched. Here is all of it, including the step I got wrong.
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Tor Deep Dive Part 2: How Tor Works and What You Are Trusting
Guards, middles, exits, the consensus and the directory authorities, with live numbers from a real Tor consensus. Then the question that matters: who can see what, and who are you trusting to get it right.
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Tor Deep Dive Part 3: Running a Tor Client on Debian 13
Installing Tor on Debian 13 from the Tor Project's own apt repository, what the package sets up by default, and how to prove traffic is really going through a circuit.
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Tor Deep Dive Part 4: SSH Over Tor, Host Keys, and Why an Onion Service Beats an Exit
Real SSH sessions over Tor on Debian 13: an onion service for SSH, the changed-host-key warning from the October 2026 exit relay incident, and the silent first connect that has no warning at all.
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Tor Deep Dive Part 6: Ebury, and How to Check Your Own Debian Hosts for It
Ebury is the SSH backdoor that sat on the hijacked Tor relays. How it hides inside a library sshd already loads, why dpkg -V stays silent, and what ESET's own detection script does and does not catch, tested on Debian 13.
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Tor Deep Dive Part 7: Finding Bad Exit Relays with a Python Scanner
How kaba found the hijacked exits, and a small Python scanner of my own that pins each Tor exit, connects out through it and compares SSH host keys and TLS certificates. Tested on a Debian 13 VM against real exits.
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Tor Deep Dive Part 8: Running a Tor Relay Securely on Debian
What the relay hijack teaches about running your own Tor relay on Debian 13: the tor.service trap, systemd hardening, file integrity checks with AIDE, a script that checks what the network publishes about your relay, and incident response.
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The 12-Second Login: How a Backup File Slowed My Matrix Banner
I built a Matrix-style login banner for fun, then noticed a long pause before it started. Chasing it led through PAM, run-parts and a backup file that was quietly running as a second MOTD. Here is the debugging, and the fix.