Latest posts
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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…
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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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Georgia Pre-K Is a Lottery, Not a Sign-Up: What Actually Happened When We Applied
Something I never once worried about in Germany or Korea became a real concern the moment we got to the US. Enrolling our first child in public Pre-K here isn’t first-come, first-served. It’s a lottery — the kind of thing I’d only ever seen on TV. This is the story of our first Georgia Pre-K lottery application…