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.
This guide turns on SonicWall's Content Filtering Service (CFS): the firewall inspects outbound HTTP/HTTPS requests, looks the destination category up against SonicWall's cloud database, and blocks or allows the request based on a profile you define. The purpose is category-based web filtering for a specific zone (typically your LAN).
This is a cmd.exe batch file that renames files in one folder by find-and-replace: it takes every file matching a mask (say *.txt ), swaps a substring in the filename (say draft → final ), and renames it. Its purpose is bulk cleanup of filenames — removing a stray word, fixing a prefix, changing a spelling — without you clicking through Explorer.
This sets up an unattended nightly job that dumps your MySQL/MariaDB databases and tars up a couple of directories, uploads both to an S3-compatible bucket with rclone , and then deletes backups in that bucket older than a retention window. Its purpose is a hands-off off-site copy that prunes itself so the bucket doesn't grow forever.
Okta's Red Team gave this one a name, HollowByte, and named things get attention. What deserves the attention here isn't the trick — it's the paperwork, or rather the lack of it.
This guide pairs two identical SonicWall appliances into an Active/Standby High Availability cluster: the Primary handles all traffic, the Secondary sits synchronized and idle, and if the Primary fails the Secondary takes over the firewall's identity and keeps traffic flowing. That is the whole purpose — surviving a hardware failure without hand-rebuilding a box.
This guide builds a read-only audit of a Microsoft DNS server: it enumerates the zones, exports every resource record to CSV, and produces a short report of records that look stale (dynamic records whose aging timestamp is older than a threshold you set). The audit script itself creates nothing and deletes nothing — its worst case is a CSV file on disk.
Docker hosts fill up quietly. Every docker pull , every CI build, every image rebuild leaves layers behind, and /var/lib/docker grows until a deploy fails with "no space left on device" at the worst possible moment. This guide sets up a scheduled job that prunes unused images older than a threshold you choose, so the host reclaims space on its own without you babysitting it.
This guide covers two related jobs on a SonicWall firewall: taking a full backup of the running configuration (and creating a restore point), and upgrading or rolling back firmware. The purpose is simple — never touch firmware or a risky rule change without a known-good copy you can boot back to.
This guide builds a read-only disk-space report. It uses PowerShell remoting ( Invoke-Command over WinRM) to query each server's local fixed disks and returns size, free space, and percent free as one combined table you can export to CSV or HTML. It does not write to, resize, or clean up any disk — it only reads WMI/CIM data.
This script reads your filesystem and reports two classes of risky files: world-writable files and directories (anyone on the box can modify them) and SUID/SGID binaries (they run with the owner's or group's privileges, often root). It writes a timestamped report and, optionally, a baseline you can diff against later. It does not change any permissions, delete anything, or modify a single file — it only runs find and writes a text report to a directory you choose.
Canonical shipped a batch of Linux kernel security fixes this month, and LWN flagged three stable kernel updates landing upstream in the same window. None of this is dramatic. It is the ordinary heartbeat of running Linux under a mail stack — but "ordinary" still means a reboot, and there are two details worth reading before you schedule one.
This guide configures SSL VPN (NetExtender) remote access on a SonicWall firewall: it opens an encrypted tunnel on the WAN so authorised users can dial in from the internet and reach an internal subnet. Everything here is done in the SonicOS web GUI as a full administrator account — there is no "script" to paste, but the changes are just as production-critical as one.
This script offboards one leaving user in a single pass: it disables their AD account, records and removes their group memberships (except the primary group), and moves the account into a disabled-users OU. A separate, clearly marked step sets mail forwarding on their mailbox. The point is a consistent, logged procedure so nothing gets missed and you can reconstruct exactly what changed.
