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.
IIS writes a fresh W3C log file on a schedule, but it never deletes the old ones. On a busy site that quietly eats the system drive until something breaks. This is the boring, reliable fix: a batch file that deletes logs older than N days, run daily by Task Scheduler.
This script runs a series of read-only and send checks against a mail domain you control: it looks up MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records with dig , tests the STARTTLS handshake on the submission port with openssl , and then sends one real test message through your server with swaks . Its purpose is to confirm, in one pass, that mail for your domain is configured to leave and arrive correctly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like knowing exactly what changed under /etc and when — after a package upgrade, after I "just tweaked one thing," after someone else touched a box. A nightly git snapshot gives me a dated, diffable trail I can read with git log and git diff . It is not a substitute for real config management, but it is cheap, honest history.
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.
