Housekeeping checks

Run routine health inspections on any server.

 ❯ Run housekeeping on app.example.com

Problems come first in a short report.

What it checks

The basics

Disk, memory and swap (zram and zswap included, the ZFS ARC counted as available), load, pending updates, the firewall, TLS certificates, failed services, the network, log anomalies, a kernel waiting for a reboot, a service still running an old binary, the timezone and the persistent journal.

The baseline

Automatic security updates, time sync, the SSH host certificate, backups, storage maintenance. See Server baseline.

Hardware

SMART and smartd, USB devices with an unwatched UPS flagged, CPU microcode on bare-metal x86, and the BMC event log.

Services

Container engines (Docker, Podman, containerd), mesh VPN agents that are down or whose login is about to expire, Home Assistant on an ordinary host, Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, CasaOS, and the services the host's memory names.

Hosts and guests

The guests of a hypervisor and what it passes through to them, the Proxmox VE baseline template's age, and files Hostwarden deployed that changed on either side.

Releases

An Ubuntu LTS past standard support, fixes waiting on Ubuntu Pro.

macOS

Failed launchd jobs, kernel panics and local Time Machine snapshots.

Coverage and limits

It covers Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, SUSE, Alpine), FreeBSD, macOS and Windows Server. In a container, clock and kernel findings belong to the host and are not reported twice. Nothing is updated, pruned or restarted. Your own checks go into memory/housekeeping.md. A scheduled run can mail you the report (Scheduled housekeeping).

What the report looks like

## Housekeeping Report: app.example.com

Date: 2026-09-26 06:17
OS: Debian 12 (Bookworm) | Last boot: 14 days ago

### Issues

CRITICAL  Disk / at 97%
WARN      12 security updates pending
WARN      SSL cert expires in 12 days

### Services

PostgreSQL    OK — 4 databases, 2.1 GB total
nginx         OK — config valid
Backups       OK — latest 6 hours ago

### System

Disk       / 97% (1.75 TB / 1.8 TB)
Memory     8.2 GB / 64 GB available
Swap       zram 1.2 / 8 GB (zstd, 3.1:1), disk 0 / 4 GB, zswap off
Load       0.42 / 0.38 / 0.35 (4 cores)
Firewall   ufw active, deny incoming
NTP        synchronized
Kernel     6.1.0-31 (matches installed — no reboot
           needed)
Updates    12 pending, all security
Auto-updates  unattended-upgrades active

The issues section only appears when problems exist, sorted by severity. A finding a decision settles shows as DECIDED — <heading> (<who>, <date>) on its line instead of a severity — see Decisions.