I erase my systems at every boot.

Over time, a system collects state on its root partition. This state lives in assorted directories like /etc and /var, and represents every under-documented or out-of-order step in bringing up the services.

“Right, run myapp-init.”

These small, inconsequential “oh, oops” steps are the pieces that get lost and don’t appear in your runbooks.

“Just download ca-certificates to … to fix …”

Each of these quick fixes leaves you doomed to repeat history in three years when you’re finally doing that dreaded RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 upgrade.

“Oh, touch /etc/ipsec.secrets or the l2tp tunnel won’t work.”