About

whoami

The person behind the terminal

I’m Sarath, a server administrator based in Kerala, India, with 14 years of hands-on experience keeping infrastructure running — quietly, reliably, and at scale.

My work sits at the intersection of Linux and Windows server environments, where I spend my time provisioning systems, hardening configurations, untangling DNS mysteries, and building automation that eliminates the kind of repetitive work that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Over the years I’ve worked across bare-metal servers, VPS environments, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and everything in between. Whether it’s a misbehaving nftables rule, a Let’s Encrypt certificate that refuses to renew, or a DNS record that propagates everywhere except where it needs to — I’ve seen it, debugged it, and written it down.

Why this blog?

Because the fix is rarely obvious, and search results don’t always surface the one command that actually works.

This blog is where I document the real-world problems I encounter — configuration issues, gotchas, edge cases, and the kind of step-by-step guides I wish had existed when I was staring at a wall of error logs at midnight. If it saved me an hour, it might save you one too.

Topics I write about:

• Linux administration — AlmaLinux, Ubuntu, Debian, systemd, shell scripting
• DNS & domains — BIND, propagation debugging, zone files
• Web hosting — Nginx, Virtualmin, Let’s Encrypt, reverse proxies
• AWS — EC2, Route 53, S3, ELB, VPC
• DevOps & automation — Bash, Ansible, Docker, GitHub Actions
• Windows Server — IIS, PowerShell, MSSQL, cross-platform administration

Get in touch

Found a mistake? Have a better approach? I’m always open to a good technical discussion.

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