Way back in my college days, I was trying to write the first version of my résumé. As a pedantic IT guy, I wanted to get everything perfect so that I could stand out despite having very little practical experience, but trying to make even small edits in OpenOffice proved to be quite difficult.

An intelligent mind once said, “if I can touch your system, then it’s not your system.” This phrase shaped the way I approached security, and increased my paranoia.

My experience with colorectal cancer officially began in 2017. After 8 rounds of chemo and 27 rounds of radiation, I came out on the other side of surgery with a permanent colostomy. Learning to live with an ostomy was a bit of a challenge, so I hope someone else can find these tips helpful.

Up until recently, my passwords were stored in a rather precarious manner. For my birthday, I decided it would be a nice gift to myself to perform a complete password refresh.

Not that long ago, I managed to delete all of my physical HV hosts, backup server, all external backups, and a bit more. The first question that most people would ask would probably be how that’s even possible. That may become a post by itself; it probably won’t, though. What really …

I’ve been working with a company that recently lost a very large amount of their infrastructure. Not only were servers lost, but also backups, application data, and much more.

Very recently, I also lost all of my personal infrastructure.

I was recently brought into an interesting project that deals with analyzing some exciting data. I have my preferred search solutions and hate java, but I had to bite my tongue and acknowledge an ELK stack is the best tool for this particular job.

Running web servers is both fun and infuriating. We get to do some really neat and fun things, sure. We also have an ever changing battlefield. When we sleep, the other guys are wide awake. Keeping a web server secure is tough.

I used to be a big lover of Drupal as a blogging platform. It’s incredibly easy and trivial to deploy a new site with and it comes with everything needed to write a blog.

This post has to come with the disclaimer that 99.97% of ESXi deployments have NO use for anything this complicated. For that 0.03% of edge cases, ESXi can be one heck of a deployment nightmare. It doesn’t have to be, though.