EST. 2026 — Notes from real server work SYSADMIN · SECURITY · AI · DIRECTADMIN Issue 01
THE SYSADMIN ALMANAC
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Learning path

Home network

Plan your Wi-Fi, set up a gateway, connect remotely, and diagnose problems.

5 steps
  1. 01
    Planning 2.4GHz WiFi Channels 1/6/11 and Multi-Floor Heatmaps
    Network

    Planning 2.4GHz WiFi Channels 1/6/11 and Multi-Floor Heatmaps

    A five-story building with seven APs per floor needs a 2.4GHz channel plan that avoids overlap both horizontally and vertically. This article covers the 1/6/11 principle, per-floor channel tables, the actual Tx power and RSSI threshold settings, and a Python script that labels floor plans with channels using PIL before a walkthrough survey to create a heatmap.

    #wifi#networking#rf#python
    9 min read·23 Aug
  2. 02
    Tell a Broken Link from an ISP Outage Before Restarting Anything
    Linux

    Tell a Broken Link from an ISP Outage Before Restarting Anything

    A typical watchdog restarts NetworkManager when ping fails, which is wrong half the time because no internet access may mean the ISP is down, not that the adapter has failed. This article distinguishes three states using nmcli, then escalates from gentle recovery to PCI remove and rescan without rebooting the machine.

    #linux#networking#systemd#debian
    9 min read·20 Sep
  3. 03
    Put an Idle VPS to Work with WireGuard — A Complete Client Guide
    Network

    Put an Idle VPS to Work with WireGuard — A Complete Client Guide

    Turn a VPS you signed up for on an annual plan into a WireGuard hub for accessing your home LAN anytime, without port forwarding — covering app installation, config imports, QR scanning, troubleshooting, and administration

    #wireguard#vpn#vps#networking
    12 min read·9 Jun
  4. 04
    LAN Access for a Team of 7 Without Open Ports: Cloudflare Zero Trust
    Network

    LAN Access for a Team of 7 Without Open Ports: Cloudflare Zero Trust

    A team of 7 needs RDP access to machines on the LAN without opening any ports to the internet — the Cloudflare Zero Trust architecture (WARP + cloudflared), with 3 lessons from implementation: a forgotten IdP setup, Gateway defaults that allow everything, and the default-deny rule people forget most often

    #cloudflare#zero-trust#vpn#remote-access
    10 min read·9 Jul
  5. 05
    Inventory Switch and AP Ports with SNMP Walk and MAC Tables
    Network

    Inventory Switch and AP Ports with SNMP Walk and MAC Tables

    You can build your own Layer 2 inventory without a controller or NMS. Write an SNMP walk with pysnmp asyncio to retrieve sysDescr, ifTable, and the bridge FDB, then convert OID indexes back into MAC addresses to find which device connects to which port on which switch.

    #snmp#networking#python#monitoring
    9 min read·22 Aug