Working with YAML in PowerShell Using powershell-yaml
The Ticket That Started This Walkthrough The ticket said a scheduled DSC pull job was failing on three of seven nodes. Twenty minutes of log reading later, the pattern was…
Process Explorer: Private Bytes vs Working Set Explained
The Ticket Said the Server Was Slow The ticket said the Citrix session host was sluggish around 4 PM every weekday. Twenty minutes with Process Explorer running and a baseline…
PowerShell Module Manifest: Versioning and Dependencies Post-Mortem
The Ticket That Started at 03:17 The pager went off at 03:17. A managed client’s nightly reporting job had failed across 40 endpoints. The error was short: The specified module…
Automating ODBC DSN Management with PowerShell Remove-OdbcDsn
Orphaned DSNs and the Ticket That Started It All The ticket read: “Application can’t connect to the database.” After remoting into the server, I ran Get-OdbcDsn and found seventeen ODBC…
Backup Encryption and Ransomware: A Post-Mortem
The alert came in at 2:47 AM. File shares encrypted. Domain controllers unreachable. The backup server — also encrypted. The client’s IT lead called it a total loss. Twenty minutes…
Cloud Security Posture Management: What Your SIEM Misses
We inherited an environment where an S3 bucket had been publicly readable for 14 months. The client ran monthly vulnerability scans. They had a SIEM. They had endpoint detection and…
Ansible Automation: Server Management and Patching at Scale
The change request was direct: patch all web servers before Friday’s maintenance window. Forty-three RHEL 8 hosts, one engineer, no automation. I tried it manually the first time – SSH…