Latest posts
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The iDRAC Was Healthy. Nobody Told Us the Password Changed.
The iDRAC login failed with two words and nothing else: “Login Failed.” There was no other message and no indication of what had changed. The ESXi hosts were running normally, and iDRAC itself was reachable. What made it more confusing was that the original password still worked on one of the four hosts. What I…
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The Server Couldn’t Reach Red Hat. It Took Three Network Changes to Fix.
One RHEL 8.7 server couldn’t establish a Red Hat subscription connection, while a comparable server in the same environment worked normally. Fixing the first network issue didn’t solve it. It only changed the symptom: no TCP, then TCP without TLS, then a working subscription connection with dnf makecache still failing. This is the incident in that order.…
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The Patching Was Finished. The Reboot Wasn’t.
Our summer shutdown ran for about two weeks across several different production schedules. Most of the work went as planned. One reboot didn’t. We didn’t realize we had a missed reboot until a temp folder problem that should have disappeared after remediation kept coming back. The hard part of the shutdown was not the patching.…
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The Agent Was Installed and Running. It Had Never Connected.
ServiceNow ACC not connected: that was the state of one of our servers for months, while the Agent Client Collector service showed Running the whole time. The cause was one config line: backend-url pointed at 127.0.0.1, because DNS could not resolve the MID server address during install. The symptom: Running, but never connected On the…
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Transfer California Driver License to Georgia: What the DDS Visit Actually Took
My DDS visit to transfer California driver license to Georgia took about 15 minutes, but I spent more time before it checking my documents than I did at the counter. I walked in without an appointment about 30 minutes before closing, there was no line, and I left with a paper temporary license. I’m writing…
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My California Real ID Driver License: Six Weeks, Two DMV Visits, One Borrowed Car
Getting my California Real ID driver license took about six weeks, two DMV visits, and eventually a coworker’s car. The paperwork wasn’t the hardest part. Finding a car and a licensed passenger for the road test was. I had never lived in the US before, so this was a first-time application, not a transfer. In…
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The Installer Exited Without an Error. SentinelOne Had Blocked It.
This is a SentinelOne blocked installer story, except the installer never told me anything had been blocked. I ran the same DBSafer agent installer on two Windows servers. One worked. On the other, the installer simply ended, with no error and no service. Same Installer, Two Servers Both servers needed the same server-side DBSafer agent,…
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The Agent Was Running. Rapid7 Said It Was Offline.
Seeing a Rapid7 agent offline in the console usually means the agent is down. In my case, the service looked like it was running, but the agent had never come up properly since the install. I reinstalled the Rapid7 agent on a Linux server. After starting it, the logs filled with certificate errors and configuration…
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The Temp Folder That Kept Coming Back
Some disk-space alerts are easy: find the big folder, clear it, and move on. I couldn’t do that here — this was a case where the Windows temp folder keeps growing back within hours, no matter how much I deleted from it. The Alert It started with a Zabbix alert on C: drive usage for…
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Filing US Taxes as an Immigrant: Two States, the Kids’ ITINs, and a June Refund
Filing US taxes as an immigrant family turned out to be less about the forms and more about the waiting. Waiting for a W-2, waiting for the kids’ ITINs to arrive, and finally waiting for a refund that showed up at the end of June. I’d already filed once before, in 2025, as a nonresident…