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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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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The Server Was Up. The Database Wasn’t.
The call came in while I was still driving to work. Production line down, database server unresponsive. There wasn’t much I could do from the car except say I was on my way. By the time I got to my desk, the database was already back. What had actually happened — an MSSQL TempDB full…
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I Gave a Good Handoff Once. I Didn’t Get One.
I didn’t really understand what a good infrastructure handoff looked like until I had to work without one. About a year and a half apart, I ended up on both sides of the same transition, in two different countries. In one direction, I was the one leaving — handing my systems to someone else. In…
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Three Backup Mistakes I’ve Seen More Than Once
Most backup mistakes I’ve run into don’t show up until someone actually needs to recover something. I’ve walked into more than one environment where backups were running fine — and nobody had ever tried to restore from them. That’s always bothered me. A green backup job can make an environment look much safer than it…