Solving real problems at work

2026-03-18

I host websites for a living. We have a number of WHM/cPanel servers using Cloudlinux. I told my wife the other day that I have been using the dummy controls for Linux for years. That understanding of broadly what is going on had really helped me pick up on learning Linux at a deeper level as I have explored different topics.

Cleaning disks up

I recently received notifications about two server’s main drives reaching a certain percentage of disk utilization. In the past, I would get into WHM, open every cPanel one by one and hunt for old backups left in places, look for massive error logs, etc.. Not anymore. Based on my find and grep learning I have done, I knew this could be made much easier.

So I asked chatGPT for a command to search for the top 20 largest files in every cPanel installation on my WHM server. It gave me a couple options for how to proceed and I picked the one I could understand and would get the job done.

The result was amazing. It ran for a few seconds and returned a list with file paths, the size of the files, and sorted it from highest the lowest. What would have taken me hours to do in hunting and stumbling upon what needed to be deleted was done in a matter of seconds.

I know I could have handled it from terminal, but I did manually go to each location and delete them there. My boldness in terminal is coming along. If it were my own machine, that is different. However, when it comes to the work servers I need to use my brain and restrain myself as I cannot risk any problems while I stretch my legs a bit and being to use my new skills for work. In the end, I still saved a ton of time by finding these files and knowing their exact locations and sizes.

Debug log save

What was also neat was that I noticed a couple sites had debug log turned on.

I then asked for a command to find all wp-configs with debug log enabled. Magic. I then had a couple sites on each server to go deal with. No hunting. No guessing. No going to bed at 6am. The entire thing took minutes - not hours.

Note taking

I’ve began assembling a cheat sheet of commands I might need/want again in Obsidian. Currently, I am using Obsidian for note taking. I honestly tried to keep notes via nano, but I just am not there yet for a terminal based note taker. That, and I can only take on so much new stuff at once. Like I watched a couple videos about other terminal based note taking and I just don’t have the time to properly evaluate everything and learn the various unique quirks of something new. Obsidian works. It’s all markdown and I can move to something else when the time comes.