In July 2015, I packed my bags and left Istanbul for a new chapter in Wrocław, Poland, to join Credit Suisse. It was a hot summer. I couldn’t afford a direct flight, so I flew to Berlin and took a bus to Wrocław. I was excited-and nervous. It was my first time living outside of Turkiye, and I was about to work for a bank I had never heard of before. ...

I have an old Huawei laptop that was originally running Windows 10. Then moved to 11 With only 8GB of memory, the system was painfully slow, just browsing internet quite frustrating. I initially considered switching to Linux Mate, but then decided to give Debian 12 a try. I used Debian between 2004 to 2015 so I know how good it is. I downloaded the minimal USB stick image of Debian 12 from here and started the installation process. The entire installation took only about 40 minutes, which was surprisingly quick. ...

For years, I’ve been using Jekyll to power my blog at ozkanpakdil.github.io. It has served me well in production, but setting it up on Windows for local testing has always been a bit of a headache. Even with WSL, the process is sluggish, making experimentation and quick iterations more cumbersome than I’d like. Recently, I started thinking about creating a PostgreSQL benchmark center website, and given my past challenges with Jekyll, I decided to explore other options. That’s when I discovered Hugo, a static site generator built with Go. I went ahead and created the site under GitHub Pages at pgbench.github.io, and the difference in speed was immediately noticeable. ...

Prologue: The Era of WebLogic and Apache Mod_WebLogic It was 2012. Turkcell, Turkey’s largest mobile operator, had 15 million subscribers, and the pressure was on. As part of the operations team for www.turkcell.com.tr, I managed a labyrinth of infrastructure: 10 strong linux servers which had Weblogic installed humming behind Apache mod_weblogic proxies, serving dynamic requests while Apache handled static content. The e-commerce platform, Turkcell Shop, was my responsibility-where a single GC pause during peak traffic could mean thousands of failed transactions and angry customers. ...

I am using Fail2Ban for around 12 years now, maybe more. It started back when ssh brute-forcing script kiddies were everywhere. Who are they? They are people or machines scanning all IPs on the internet, and if they find an open SSH port, they start doing brute force password attacks. They do this for MySQL, PostgreSQL, or basically any open port. If there is a possibility of username/password login, someone will try to get in. ...