Kulolo Tech Log

Principles of Resilient Self-Hosting on Linux

2026-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Self-hosting critical personal infrastructure requires treating your VPS like production:

Graceful Reloads: Web servers like Caddy and Nginx support atomic configuration validation and smooth reload signals (systemctl reload) without dropping in-flight TCP streams.
Deterministic Renewals: ACME certificates must have automated post-renewal hooks that concatenate extended trust anchors and notify dependent reverse proxies.
Principle of Least Privilege: Sensitive administrative endpoints should bind strictly to 127.0.0.1 and rely on SSH port forwarding or reverse proxy authentication rather than public internet exposure.

Keeping systems minimal, auditable, and automated ensures high uptime with zero routine maintenance overhead.

Demystifying Zero-Copy I/O and Modern TLS Tuning

2026-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

High-throughput network services often spend disproportionate CPU cycles copying buffers between kernel space and user space.

The Splice and Sendfile Primitives

By leveraging splice(2):

ssize_t splice(int fd_in, loff_t *off_in, int fd_out,
               loff_t *off_out, size_t len, unsigned int flags);

Data flows directly between pipe buffers and socket descriptors without crossing the kernel-user memory boundary.

TLS Handshake Padding and Post-Quantum Extensions

With post-quantum key exchange algorithms like ML-DSA-65 and Kyber gaining adoption, TLS handshake record sizes increase substantially. Ensuring that certificate chains and padding calculations provide sufficient headroom prevents subtle MTU fragmentation issues across heterogeneous network links.

Why Zola is the Best Choice for Static Blogs in 2026

2026-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Static site generators (SSGs) have evolved significantly over the last decade. From Jekyll to Hugo, and now to Rust-powered engines like Zola.

Why Zola?

Single Binary Simplicity: Unlike Node-based generators that pull in gigabytes of node_modules, Zola is distributed as a single static binary.
Tera Templating: Tera borrows the best design patterns from Jinja2 and Django templates, making layout inheritance clean and intuitive.
Built-in Sass Compilation: No need for external Webpack, Gulp, or Sass compilers. Zola compiles Sass stylesheets natively in milliseconds.
Extreme Build Speeds: Building hundreds of pages takes under 50ms, enabling instantaneous feedback loops.

# zola.toml configuration snippet
compile_sass = true
minify_html = false
build_search_index = false

For engineers seeking minimal maintenance burden and bulletproof security, pairing Zola with a lightweight web server is hard to beat.