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

Two-Factor Admin Login on a Check Point Gaia Gateway

This guide points Gaia's administrator authentication (the WebUI, SSH, and console logins on a Check Point gateway) at an external RADIUS server that enforces a second factor — a push, an OTP, or an SMS code. The gateway itself has no built-in TOTP; it delegates authentication to RADIUS, and the RADIUS/MFA server is where the second factor actually lives. Get that mental model straight before you touch anything: if the RADIUS server is unreachable or misconfigured, admin login can fail.

6 min read
MailSecurity

Remove Stale Exchange Mailbox Delegates and Restore Security

This guide finds and removes delegate access that a former or reassigned user still holds on other people's mailboxes in Exchange Online — the four kinds that actually let one account read or send as another: Full Access , Send As , Send on Behalf , and folder-level (calendar) delegate permissions. Its purpose is offboarding hygiene: when someone leaves or changes roles, their standing access to shared and personal mailboxes should go with them.

9 min read
MailLinux

Report Mail Users Over Quota with Cron

This is a read-and-report job. It runs doveadm quota get to list every mail user's quota usage, picks out the ones over a percentage you set, and emails you a summary. It does not change quotas, delete mail, or touch mailboxes — nothing here is destructive.

9 min read
MailSecurity

The Zimbra SNMP hole: who's actually exposed to CVE-2026-73570

Shadowserver's scans put the count at 274 internet-facing Zimbra instances already compromised through CVE-2026-73570, up from 155 flagged on August 20. That's the headline, and both Help Net Security and BleepingComputer reported it on the same Monday. If you run Zimbra Collaboration Suite on the public internet and you haven't moved to v10.1.20, this is your problem now, not next sprint.

3 min read
Security

Traffic Shaping and Bandwidth Management on a Palo Alto Firewall

This guide sets up QoS (Quality of Service) on a Palo Alto firewall so you can guarantee bandwidth to important traffic (say VoIP), cap bandwidth for greedy traffic (backups, streaming), and prioritise real-time flows during congestion. QoS on PAN-OS is enforced on the egress direction of an interface, which is the single most important thing to understand before you build anything — I cover it below.

6 min read
WindowsSecurity

Automate NTFS Permission Audits and Detect Oversharing on File Servers

This guide gives you a PowerShell script that walks a share tree, reads the NTFS access control list (ACL) on each folder, and reports every place where a broad identity — Everyone , Authenticated Users , Domain Users , BUILTIN\Users — has been granted Write, Modify, or Full Control. That combination is the classic definition of "oversharing," and this script's only job is to find it and write it to a CSV. It reads permissions. It does not change a single ACE.

9 min read
Linux

Monitor systemd Socket Activation and Alert on Queue Depth

When systemd hands a listening socket to a service, the kernel keeps completed connections in an accept queue until the service calls accept() on them. If the service falls behind — thread-starved, blocked on a slow database, whatever — that queue fills. Past the socket's backlog it silently drops or refuses connections. This guide sets up a small, read-only monitor that watches the accept-queue depth on your listening sockets and raises an alert before you hit that wall.

9 min read
Security

Configure DNS Security and Threat Prevention on a FortiGate (FortiOS 7.x)

This guide configures the FortiGate's own DNS resolver to use FortiGuard servers, builds a DNS Filter security profile (FortiGuard category blocking, botnet C&C domain blocking, and an optional static domain block list), and applies that profile to an outbound firewall policy. The purpose is to stop clients from resolving known-malicious, botnet, and unwanted-category domains before a connection is ever made.

8 min read
WindowsSecurity

A Daily Report of Failed RDP Logons Across Your Servers

This guide builds a read-only PowerShell script that pulls failed logon events (Security log Event ID 4625 ) from a list of servers, keeps the ones that look like RDP attempts, and writes them to a dated HTML/CSV report you can review each morning. It optionally emails that report. It creates nothing and deletes nothing on the target servers — it only reads their Security logs.

10 min read
MailLinux

Automate Postfix Transport Map Updates Without Downtime

This guide gives you a small bash script that rebuilds a Postfix transport map from its flat-file source, validates the configuration, and reloads Postfix so the new routing takes effect. postfix reload re-reads configuration and recycles daemons gracefully — it does not drop in-flight SMTP connections or stop the queue, which is why we use it instead of restart .

8 min read
LinuxSecurity

OVSwrap (CVE-2026-64531): a local-root kernel bug hiding in a very large patch wave

On 21 August 2026 Canonical pushed out a broad set of kernel security notices, and threaded through most of them is one identifier: CVE-2026-64531 , nicknamed OVSwrap , an Open vSwitch flaw in the Linux kernel that leads to local root. The oss-security post that carries the name declines AI crawlers , so I only have its subject line to confirm the classification — Linux kernel / OVS, local privilege escalation. The details of the write-up I can't quote, and won't guess at.

3 min read
Security

Enable and Tune Suricata IDS/IPS on pfSense

Suricata is a deep-packet inspection engine. In IDS mode it watches a copy of the traffic on an interface and raises alerts; in IPS mode it actively blocks hosts or drops packets that match a rule. That second mode is the dangerous one: a noisy or badly tuned rule can block a legitimate host — including your own management workstation — and cut production traffic. Treat this as a change to a live firewall, not a lab toy.

7 min read
WindowsSecurity

Audit Windows Firewall Rules and Report Drift From a Baseline

This guide builds two small PowerShell scripts. The first captures the current Windows Firewall ruleset to a CSV baseline . The second re-reads the live rules and reports which ones were added, removed, or changed since that baseline. Both scripts are read-only — they use Get-* cmdlets only and change no firewall rules, so running the audit cannot break connectivity.

10 min read