Shore Up
Ketan AagjaDirector of IT · 22+ years in infrastructure, security & mail systems

Runs enterprise networks and security for a living, and writes Shore Up to turn two decades of hands-on Linux, Windows and mail-server work into guides you can actually use.

Security

Upgrade a Check Point Gateway with CPUSE, Step by Step

CPUSE (the Gaia Deployment Agent) is Check Point's built-in tool for importing, verifying, and installing hotfixes and major-version upgrades on a Gaia gateway. In this guide I use it to take one gateway from one major version to the next. A major-version install reboots the box and replaces the running OS image — while it runs, that gateway passes no traffic and its management is offline. Treat it as a full outage, not a quick patch.

7 min read
WindowsSecurity

Audit Local Administrators Across Many Windows Machines

This is a read-only audit. It pulls a list of computers from Active Directory, connects to each one over PowerShell Remoting (WinRM), reads the membership of the local Administrators group, and writes everything to a single CSV you can open in Excel. It creates nothing and changes nothing on the target machines, so there is no destructive step and nothing to roll back — the only thing produced is the report file on your own workstation.

9 min read
Linux

Automate Linux Network Bonding Health Checks and Alerts

A bond only earns its keep when a NIC or switch port dies and nobody notices — because the traffic kept flowing on the surviving link. The failure mode I care about is the silent one: you lose a slave, run degraded for three weeks, then lose the second one and take an outage that looks instant but was really two failures spread over a month. This guide sets up a small, read-only script on a systemd timer that watches your bond and shouts when a slave goes down.

9 min read
Security

Troubleshoot Check Point Traffic with fw monitor and cpview

fw monitor is Check Point's kernel packet-capture tool: it shows you a packet at four fixed points as the gateway inspects it, so you can tell where a flow is being dropped. cpview is a live, top-style performance dashboard for CPU, memory, connections, and throughput. Both are diagnostic and read-only — neither changes your policy or configuration.

7 min read
Windows

Automate a GPO Backup and Export with PowerShell

This guide sets up a PowerShell script that backs up every Group Policy Object in your domain to a dated folder and, optionally, exports a human-readable HTML report of each one. Backing up GPOs is a read-only operation — Backup-GPO does not change, delete, or unlink anything in Active Directory. It copies the policy settings, security filtering, and WMI filter links into files on disk. The risky part is not the backup; it's the restore , which I cover at the end and which you should treat with real care.

9 min read
Linux

Batch-Convert and Optimise Images with a Watch Script

This sets up a background service that watches a directory and, whenever a new JPEG or PNG lands there, produces a resized, stripped, and re-compressed copy in a separate output directory. Its purpose is to keep uploaded or generated images small and consistent without anyone running a command by hand.

8 min read
LinuxSecurity

Samba's July batch: one domain-takeover bug hiding behind a pile of DoS

Ubuntu and Debian both shipped a Samba fix on 28 July 2026 — USN-8621-1 on the Ubuntu side, DSA-6401-1 on Debian's. It's a fat advisory: eight CVEs in one go. But counting CVEs is the wrong way to read it. Seven of the eight are denial-of-service, and exactly one of them is the reason you should stop reading and go patch.

3 min read
Security

Configure ClusterXL High Availability on Check Point R81.20

This guide builds a ClusterXL High Availability (Active/Standby) pair from two Check Point gateways: two physical or virtual firewalls share one set of virtual IPs, and if the active member fails, the standby takes over the traffic and the connections. Its purpose is redundancy, not more throughput — HA mode passes traffic through one member at a time.

6 min read
Windows

Automate Print-Queue Cleanup and Clearing Stuck Jobs

Stuck print jobs are one of those recurring, low-glamour tickets: a queue jams, one document sits in "Error" or "Deleting" forever, and everything behind it stalls. This guide gives you two standard tools — a graceful per-job cleanup and the classic spooler reset — and shows how to run them safely on a schedule.

9 min read
Security

"Back Up a Check Point Gaia System: Backup, Snapshot, and Migrate Export"

Check Point gives you three different ways to save the state of a Gaia machine, and admins mix them up constantly. They are not interchangeable. This guide walks all three on Gaia R81.20 (standalone Security Management Server or gateway, not a Multi-Domain Server), driven from Gaia clish with a bit of expert mode. If you run MDS the paths and tools differ — stop and read the Multi-Domain guide instead.

7 min read
Windows

Bulk-Update AD User Attributes from a CSV

This guide reads a CSV of users and writes two attributes back to Active Directory for each one: Title and Department . Nothing is created or deleted — existing user objects have those two fields overwritten with the values in your file. That overwrite is a real change: if the CSV has a wrong value in a row, that user's title or department is now wrong until you fix it. There is no built-in "undo," so the safety step below is to export the current values first so you can put them back.

9 min read
Linux

Auto-Restart Failing systemd Services with Backoff

This guide configures systemd to automatically restart a service when it fails, with an increasing delay between attempts (backoff), and to fire an alert when it exhausts its retries and stays down. Nothing here touches your application's data — it only changes how systemd supervises the unit — but a badly tuned restart loop can hammer CPU, disk, or an upstream database by relaunching a broken process over and over, so treat the values as production settings, not guesses.

8 min read