Background: I run a small anycast network, wanted to understand what I was actually abstracting away. Dropped cPanel/WHM for raw Debian on a HostHatch VPS. 30 days, full CLI.
Wins:
- Learned systemd timers properly, replaced cron knowledge gaps
- Netfilter rules finally make sense when you write them directly
- No abstraction layer between me and fail2ban logs
Losses:
- Day 3: Spent 45 minutes on a TLS cert issue that turned out to be a trailing newline in a config
- Day 14: Misconfigured postfix master.cf, mail queued silently for 6 hours
- Day 28: Ran `mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb` on what I believed was the secondary data disk. It was not. It was the primary on a different HostHatch box, SSH session persistent through a hostname I'd reused in my terminal history. Complete wipe. No backups because "I was setting up the backup server."
Back to a panel for that node. Not the experiment's intended lesson.
RPKI and IRR have nothing to do with this. Just wanted you to know I know the difference.
