The collective
EchoLinux started in 2019 as a shared notebook — a place to keep the commands and config files that three people kept emailing to each other. Over time more contributors joined, the articles got longer and more careful, and the site became something other people actually visited.
We are not a company, a startup, or affiliated with any vendor. We don't take paid placements or sponsorships. Everything here reflects our own setups, our own opinions, and where we got things wrong the first time.
The name comes from the early amateur radio practice of "echo" servers — simple systems that reflected back exactly what you sent, useful for testing whether a path was working. We liked the metaphor: a site that gives you back something useful when you query it.
Contributors
Tobias Marlen
Berlin, DE — Arch LinuxNetwork engineer by day. Writes mostly about routing, DNS, and VPN setups. Runs a small BGP lab at home. Opinions on systemd are strong and frequently expressed.
Priya Khatri
Bristol, UK — NixOSSoftware developer who converted her spare-room rack to NixOS in 2021 and has been writing about reproducible system configuration ever since. Also: Jellyfin, Immich, and aggressive storage monitoring.
Declan O’Brien
Dublin, IE — Debian stableSysadmin background, longest-running homelab (since 2007). Handles most of the backup, monitoring, and disaster-recovery guides. Believes in boring technology for anything that must stay running.
Editorial approach
We try to write the guide we wished existed when we were setting something up. That means:
- Real commands that actually work on a clean install of the stated distro.
- Explaining why a config option exists, not just what to paste.
- Noting the things that are easy to get wrong.
- Updating articles when they go stale rather than leaving outdated instructions up.
If you find an error, or if something we wrote broke something for you, please let us know via the contact page. We correct mistakes and credit reporters.
Licensing
All original prose and code samples on EchoLinux are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. You may adapt and redistribute with attribution. Configuration snippets and shell scripts are additionally available under the MIT License.