Real systems. Misleading symptoms. Evidence first.
Real IT Troubleshooting Stories and Sysadmin Field Notes
Real-world IT troubleshooting stories about servers, networks, security, backups, automation, and the failures that only make sense after the evidence arrives.
Latest failure · June 2026The Phantom Bad Blocks: How a 15-Year-Old Linux Bug Took Down 75 Security Cameras
A field report on diagnosing and repairing a RAID failure that wasn't a hardware failure at all — and why 'replace the disk' would have made it far worse.
Read the whole mess →Failure reports worth keeping
The TLS Cert Only an API Could Renew
A FreePBX user panel served an expired TLS cert, every reload swore it was fixed, and the only thing that actually moved the needle was calling the cert module's own regeneration API.
Open report →The Alert That Went to Nobody
A critical event fired a perfectly good alert into a receiver wired to absolutely no one — and everybody slept fine because of it.
Open report →When Postgres Won't Start
A database stuck forever on 'starting up' wasn't broken — it was clawing its way through WAL replay on a dying disk.
Open report →The Sensor That Cried Wolf
A loud-sound detector paged us all night for slamming doors — because it measured volume, not meaning.
Open report →Why Your Fitness Tracker's Correlations Are Lying to You
I built a dashboard that confidently told me walking ruins my sleep — then I learned what a confounder is.
Open report →The App That Wouldn't Open After an Update
A desktop app auto-updated, swallowed its own window, and hung forever — and the fix had nothing to do with the install.
Open report →These are not clean-room tutorials built around a predictable demo. They are stories from real technical work: the outage that looked like hardware but was software, the alert that worked perfectly and reached nobody, the backup that behaved exactly as configured and still caused damage, and the API that turned one innocent assumption into a very long night.
Every field note follows the evidence. The useful part is rarely the final command by itself. It is the misleading symptom, the tempting wrong answer, the check that changed the direction of the investigation, and the boundary that keeps the same failure from returning.