Latest posts
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Seven Incidents, One Pattern: What Being an Infrastructure Engineer Actually Looks Like
Seven incidents in one year taught me more about being an infrastructure engineer than any certification did. None of them were huge disasters. A stale VMware snapshot nobody deleted. A backup server that went down from a full media disk. A backup policy that was never created for three new servers. A Zabbix alert threshold that didn’t catch a server going down soon…
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Visa Stamped, Flight in 10 Hours: What Actually Happened When I Returned to the US
Visa stamped, passport back in hand — and my flight to the US was leaving in 10 hours. Moving from California to Georgia meant redoing my visa from scratch. My E-2 visa — a treaty investor visa tied to a specific employer — had been issued based on my original California employer, and it didn’t…
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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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ITIN vs SSN for My Kids: What Actually Happened When We Filed Taxes
The first thing that stalled our tax filing wasn’t the return itself — it was getting my kids an ITIN. To file taxes in the US, you need either an SSN or an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number). Our kids weren’t born here, so an SSN was never on the table. That left one real…
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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,…
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The Alert That Never Fired: What a Default Zabbix Threshold Almost Cost Us
A default Zabbix alert threshold let a server go down unnoticed — we found out from the client. Here’s what changed after. The Incident One of the VMs we monitor for a client started having trouble on an otherwise normal day. CPU and memory usage spiked hard and fast, and because it was a VM…
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VMware Snapshots Nobody Deleted: What I Found Reviewing a New Environment
I didn’t set out to do a VMware snapshots cleanup. I was just getting familiar with a new environment — and that’s exactly how I found snapshots that had quietly outlived whatever reason they were created for. The Environment The VMs in question had been in production since 2024, when a factory environment was first…
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Opening a Bank Account and Building Credit in the US: What Actually Happened, Step by Step
Nobody hands you a manual for this when you land. Opening a bank account in the US, getting a Social Security Number, and building credit from zero — here’s the real timeline of how it happened, and how it compared to doing the same things in Korea and Germany. Getting the SSN The earliest available…