Linux on Alexander's Blog

Fixing logrotate's Glob Confusion

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A follow-up to the wildcard bug post from last year.

Picking the Thread Back Up

The rename workaround, *.example.com to _.example.com, fully resolved the operational problem. Retention became predictable again, and there was no pressing reason to go further. But a workaround isn’t a fix, and the actual bug was still sitting in logrotate’s own source, waiting to bite the next person who names a file after a wildcard domain. This week I finally sat down and found it properly, instead of just renaming files around it.

The Wildcard That Broke Nginx Log Rotation

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of those infrastructure problems that looks simple, until you realize the filename itself is part of the problem.

The Setup

We had Nginx configured to handle wildcard subdomains: server_name *.example.com;, with access logs named after the server block. That’s a convenient pattern for multi-tenant setups where subdomains get created dynamically and you don’t want to hand-maintain a vhost file per tenant. Nginx doesn’t care that the resulting log filename contains a literal * - it just opens the file and writes to it.

Deploying Vaultwarden with Ansible: My Homelab's First Real Service

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I started self-hosting for a boring reason: I didn’t like that a single cloud account breach could hand someone every password I own. A self-hosted password manager has its own risks, but at least the blast radius is mine to control. Vaultwarden (a lightweight Bitwarden-compatible server) was the obvious first service, and I used it as an excuse to do my homelab properly instead of SSH-ing in and running commands by hand.