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.
Group Policy failures are quiet. A client silently stops applying a GPO, the setting it was enforcing drifts, and nobody notices until something breaks. This guide builds a scheduled report that reads each computer's Group Policy error events, groups them by computer and (where the event names it) by GPO, and drops a CSV and HTML file somewhere you'll actually look.
A memory-corruption bug in Google's Brotli decoder, CVE-2026-111497, got the scary framing it deserves — The Hacker News leads with the Node.js RCE and the long tail of affected software, and the oss-security list carried the coordination thread. Before you start grepping your mail stack in a panic, though, let me narrow the blast radius, because the triage instinct ("Brotli is in TLS, so my mail TLS is exposed") is wrong.
This guide builds interface-based traffic shaping on a FortiGate: you define traffic classes (the "queues"), group them into a shaping profile that gives each class a guaranteed floor and a maximum ceiling of the link's bandwidth, apply that profile to an egress interface, then steer traffic into the right class with a shaping policy. The purpose is simple QoS — keep latency-sensitive traffic (VoIP, for example) from being drowned out by bulk downloads.
Share permissions drift. Someone grants a contractor "just temporary" access, a helpdesk ticket adds a group to a folder, an app installer rewrites an ACL — and six months later nobody remembers why Everyone can write to the finance share. This guide builds a simple, read-only baseline of your NTFS share ACLs and a weekly job that tells you exactly what has changed since.
Postfix is good at retrying mail on its own, but over time a busy server collects two kinds of junk in its spool: messages that have been deferred for days and will never deliver, and partial or misplaced files left behind by a crash or an abrupt restart. This guide sets up a safe, scheduled cleanup for both — using Postfix's own tools, not manual file surgery.
By default a SonicWall HA pair fails over when the active unit dies outright — power loss, hardware fault, a crash that stops the heartbeat. What it does not do out of the box is fail over when a single data interface loses link or when the upstream next hop goes away but the appliance itself is fine. Interface monitoring closes that gap: you tell the cluster which interfaces matter, and optionally give it an upstream target to probe, so a dead WAN or a pulled LAN cable forces the standby to take over.
This guide gives you a read-only PowerShell script that lists every enabled AD computer account and flags the ones whose DNS A record can't be resolved — the classic symptom of a machine that was renamed, rebuilt, or removed without cleaning up DNS, or a zone where scavenging has drifted out of sync with AD. It reads AD and queries DNS; it does not create, change, or delete anything.
Having two MX hosts is not the same as knowing failover works. The only way to trust it is to test it: confirm both hosts answer on port 25 and accept mail for your domain, and once in a while prove that when the primary is down, the secondary still takes the message and holds it. This guide gives you a small probe script you can run on a schedule, and a controlled live drill for the real thing.
CISA added CVE-2026-60004 , described as a Gitea code injection vulnerability, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 25 August 2026. The KEV listing is the important part: CISA doesn't add things to that catalog on theory. It adds them when there's evidence of active exploitation in the wild. So this isn't "a bug was disclosed" — it's "somebody is using this against real servers right now."
This guide configures a Cisco ASA to send its event logs to a central syslog server (or SIEM) so you have off-box, timestamped audit evidence. It changes the firewall's logging configuration only — it does not touch access rules, NAT, or routing — but you are still editing a production security appliance, so treat it accordingly.
This guide builds a scheduled PowerShell script that reads the Group Policy operational event log, collects the error events from the last 24 hours, and writes them to an HTML file (optionally emailed). It is a reporting tool: it never edits, links, or unlinks a GPO, and it makes no change to any policy or to the events themselves. The only thing it creates on the system is a report file and — if you follow the last section — a scheduled task.
This script reads your Postfix relay-control settings with postconf and flags configurations that could let outsiders relay mail through your server — the classic "open relay" that gets you onto blocklists and turns your box into a spam cannon. It is read-only. It changes nothing, writes nothing, and reloads nothing , so there is no config to back up and nothing to roll back. It simply reports.
This guide configures two related Palo Alto features: a Zone Protection profile (broad, per-zone flood defence applied at the edge, before a session is even created) and a DoS Protection profile + policy rule (granular defence for specific servers). Their whole job is to drop traffic once a rate threshold is crossed. That is the point — and also the danger. Set a Max Rate too low and you will drop legitimate production traffic; enable a block action and you will hold that drop for the block duration.
