I logged into one of my servers on Monday, and for whatever reason, I ran ss, when what did my eyes behold but an unfamiliar IP with an established connection to my SSH daemon. Unaccustomed to this, I immediately freaked out and restarted the server, thinking someone had broken in. They’d be back, but rebooting would give me a couple seconds to collect my thoughts. This was wholly unnecessary. Before I rebooted, I checked who and noted that I was the only one with a login shell, but that doesn’t guarantee the attacker isn’t being more stealthy.

Nothing’s worse than when your domain controllers won’t talk to each other. In an ideal world, I’d have redundant file servers with redudnant power, feeding redundant virtual machine servers ready to failover at a moment’s notice. But life is rarely ideal, so when a few freak accidents like my virtualization server kernel panicing during backups (more on that later), and some odd ATA errors on my main domain controller come along, the resulting corruption can be a pain.

For a while now, I’ve thought Wordpress was highly overkill for what I do with this blog. Coupled with the security and logistic issues arising from running a PHP app accessing an SQL database, and the fact that I was more likely to forget my post in the process of updating Wordpress, this lack of need made me seriously consider a static site generator. I hadn’t actually heard that such utilities exist, so I did the stubborn thing and started thinking about writing my own.