Latest posts
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I Thought VMware Snapshots Were My Recovery Plan. They Were Only Part of It.
This started as a simple question I thought I already had the answer to: VMware snapshot vs BMR. For a long time, my answer was easy — snapshots covered the everyday stuff, a bad patch or a config change gone wrong, roll back and move on. Bare Metal Restore was the deep end, the thing…
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My Zabbix Proxy Was Down. The Problem Wasn’t the Proxy.
When I first saw the proxy log, I was convinced I was looking at a MySQL problem. I wasn’t. The chain that took my Zabbix proxy down that night started with Ubuntu unattended-upgrades. I didn’t catch this one through an alert. Zabbix can’t very well page you about its own proxy going dark, and the…
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NetBackup Kept Failing on One VM. The Datastore Was Almost Full.
This is the kind of failure that looks like a NetBackup problem — right up until you check vSAN datastore free space. It started with a single VM. Every night, the same backup job showed up in the NetBackup activity monitor as failed, while everything else on the same policy completed fine. The failure log…
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We Fixed the Firewall Rule. AWS Authentication Still Failed.
When a cloud recovery test starts failing, I usually check our own firewall rule first. That’s how it’s gone the last few times. This time it wasn’t that simple. The Setup The cloud recovery test was requested in mid-July, but another issue took priority. We didn’t actually start testing until mid-August. The goal was simple:…
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Three New Servers, One Missing Backup Policy: A NetBackup Handoff Lesson
A routine NetBackup policy review caught something I hadn’t expected to find: three VMs running with a missing backup policy for nearly a month. Nothing had crashed, no alert had fired — the servers were just quietly running with a NetBackup backup policy that was never created in the first place. The Setup A client in our…
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The DNS Troubleshooting Workflow I Actually Use
Most of the DNS problems I get called about don’t announce themselves as DNS problems. They show up as “the server is unreachable,” “the backup job failed overnight,” or, in the case I’m about to walk through, “the backup job succeeded, but something’s wrong with the data.” My dns troubleshooting workflow exists because by the…
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Why Every Disaster Recovery Plan Needs Regular Testing
The first time we ran disaster recovery testing here, it didn’t expose a technology problem. It exposed a documentation problem — and that turned out to be the harder one to fix. The Setup I started managing this environment in October 2025. The stack is VMware on the virtualization side, Hitachi and Dell Unity on…
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When “Connection Reset by Peer” Was Actually a Firewall Rule: A Rapid7 Insight Agent Story on RHEL 9.6
A few weeks ago I got assigned a task that sounded almost too simple to write about: deploy the Rapid7 Insight Agent on a new RHEL 9.6 host using certificate-based authentication. I’d done plenty of Insight Agent installs before with token-based deployment, so I figured this would be a thirty-minute job — install the RPM,…