I created this space to clear my internal cache, log my thoughts, ideas, and various things I want documentation for. ## whoami I'm a tech enthusiast/hobbyist that enjoys solving (mostly creating) complex engineering problems. I like... - dogs (I have three of them) - video games - reading - music/movies/anime - learning new technical skills - upgrading + adding to my homelab - all things linux and cloud computing If you want to know more about me, continue reading through the text below. ## Power-On Self Test My love for computers and all things tech began at a young age, playing Prince of Persia, Doom, and Half-Life on my dad's computer. ![[Pasted image 20250310190104.png | 510]] I still remember the day my dad brought home the Half-Life: Day One demo from work—I spent all night playing it. I played it so much that by the time I finally played through Black Mesa (think of this as the remaster for Half Life 1, though its much more than a simple remaster), I instinctively reached to turn off my monitor near the end of Chapter 5: We've Got Hostiles—old habits from the CRT days. ![[Pasted image 20250310193344.png | 510]] I spent a good chunk of my childhood and early teens bricking and rebuilding the family computer—thanks to a steady diet of suspicious MP3s and cracked PC games from Limewire. ![[Pasted image 20250303092829.png | 510]] During the peak xbox live days, you could find me bridging host (stealing host advantage) in games such as halo 2, halo 3, and gears of war using cain & abel and zone alarm. ![[Pasted image 20250303171146.png | 510]] *its important to note that what I was doing here was 100% cheating lol* ## SYSINIT My professional career really didn't begin until 2013 when I landed my first real IT job as a Sysadmin/IT Director for a mid size corporation. My IT career timeline at this point was the following... Field Service Ops -> Help Desk lvl 1- 3 -> MSP Support Engineer 1 - 3 This role was a huge milestone for me. I was in charge of two main office locations, 5 satellite locations, around 50 servers, and prolly like 400+ networked devices, and I got to wear a suit to work. With that said, the network was in complete disarray when I joined. ![[IMAG0285.jpg | 510]] Yea... now imagine this same setup across 7 different offices.. ![[IMAG0284.jpg | 510]] My all time favorite has to be the Windows 2K3 AD/File Server combo chilling on a file cart... ![[Pasted image 02847620385672085.jpg| 510]] At least this broom closet was clean.... ![[Pasted image 80265353872547.jpg| 510]] Anyways, thankfully after these pics were taken. I was setting up brand new server and network infra across all our office locations. I definitely had my hands full the first few years here. ## Kernel panic: Fatal exception - Covid 19 ![[Pasted image 20250311233523.png | 510]] Fast forward 6 years, its Summer 2019 and I'm putting together quotes for an upcoming company wide hardware refresh for all client endpoints. Servers? Mostly virtualized within ESXi. AD/File Server sitting on a file cart in a broom closet? Virtualized. RIP file cart server. Being a law firm, we had client endpoints split like 30/70 between laptops and desktops. My goal was to move everyone to laptops just to make managing all these endpoints easier on me. Remember, this job was a one man show. Outside of hiring outside companies for consulting on large projects, it's still me doing all the work. Also, with all our attorneys working from home a few days a week at this point, I could foresee a future where even paralegals and secretaries might be awarded the luxury to work from home a few days a week. Unfortunately, partnership did not agree with my vision so paralegals and secretaries stayed on desktop clients and only attorneys got new laptops. *important note: we were a dell shop so all dell everything except for networking equipment. servers, desktop, and laptops all dell*. ![[Pasted image 20250311235533.png | 510]] It's November now, the new equipment we ordered back in August has started showing up and I'm almost finished migrating our main office onto their new desktops and laptops. I'm seeing news on twitter about a new type of flu outbreak in China, with video footage being shared of people collapsing in the street. Scary stuff. If only I knew what was coming... ![[Pasted image 20250312000334.png | 510]] It's now February 2020, COVID-19 is in full swing. Flight restrictions are being implemented and that disney princess cruise ship is quarantined in Japan. We're having daily meetings about covid-19 by this point with the main discussion point being what happens if we have to shut the office down. How is everyone going to work from home? If only we all had laptops, everyone could just start working from home now. If it's not clear by this point I am a bit jaded because I know this just meant more work for me. Supply chains were already impacted so ordering additional laptops wasn't possible. Reading the tea leaves I began preparing for the inevitable shutdown. I started prepping our old desktops to use as jump terminals for all our support staff and ordered enough openvpn licenses where the entire company could work remotely if needed. ![[Pasted image 20250312003826.png | 510]] We're now halfway through March. Texas is in a state of emergency, dine-in restaurants and bars are closed, and more than a handful of states across the country are in full on lockdown mode. By now all the attorneys are working from home and the partnership gave me 3 weeks to get the rest of the office setup to work remotely. This was roughly 150 employees and leadership didn't want them taking their new desktops home, so I am now turning all their old desktops into jump terminals. These desktops we're all wiped before hand back in February so now it was just a matter of imaging them, re-joining them to the domain, and then deploying the vpn client via group policy along with other security settings and restrictions (bitlocker encryption, dlp prevention, anti-virus, pulseway-rmm, etc.). Okay so how is this gonna work. Once all the support staff took their jump terminals home and got them setup, they would login using their ad credentials, connect to vpn, pass an mfa check, and then rdp onto their computers at the office using a preloaded shortcut on their jump terminals desktop. ![[not_terrible_not_great.gif]] It's important to note that they could not connect to their computer at the office without first connecting to vpn and full tunneling was enabled so all they could do from their jump terminals while connected to vpn is rdp onto their office computers. From there they would use their computer as if they were in the office. All-in-all it worked pretty well outside of a few hiccups and by the time Texas was issued its stay at home order, the entire company was working remotely. This was our future for the next year and a half before we returned to the office. ## Winter Storm Uri  Okay so fast forward 10 months, it's now February 2021 and everyone at the company has been working from home for over a year at this point. We get hit by a fairly large winter storm whose severity is really only exacerbated by the poor state of our power grid. As you can imagine working in IT, and with most of the state slowly losing power over that first 24 hours. It didn't take long till I was being bombarded by calls and emails. Imagine you're slowly freezing to death in your house and the only thing you have for entertainment are emails from people who make 100x more than you, asking if you can fix the power being out at the office.... ![[Pasted image 20250330152621.png | 510]] Anyways I ended up eventually losing cell service and spent the next 5 days huddled around the fireplace in the living room with my family. We lived off coffee, smores, and tea/water I warmed up with a coleman camping cook set I had. Despite the situation, we made the best out of what we had. ## VDI & Migrating to AWS Fast forward to summer 2021, July to be exact, and I'm knee deep in migrating all our on-prem infrastructure to AWS. Easily the most fun I've had since the covid lockdowns went into place. I had been pushing for this migration since 2018 so when the green light finally came, it felt like a huge personal win to me. Ironically, all it took was the company being inconvenienced for a week for them to sign-off on the project. Being primarily a Windows shop made this a breeze, a lot of which had to do with the fact that all the servers I was migrating were Server 2019 and AWS had really streamlined their on-prem to cloud migration process with the introduction of MGN (Application Migration Service). For this project I mainly used MGN and DataSync. MGN for discovery and replication of our physical servers, and DataSync for transferring all our archive case data to S3. ## Contact ``` ✉️: [email protected] ``` if you want to contact me using more secure methods [↓] ``` -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- mDMEZ8QUYBYJKwYBBAHaRw8BAQdArBAvxg2ksvRnTknmLGJTs1cD1wM+ZoBJLhT7 Np+gNUy0OHplcm9zaGFyZCAoVHJ1c3QgaXMgYSBzaWduZWQgaGFzaCkgPHplcm9z aGFyZEBwcm90b24ubWU+iJMEExYKADsWIQSaHKezsZcm2FgcC5q3hiaI/602pAUC Z8QUYAIbAwULCQgHAgIiAgYVCgkICwIEFgIDAQIeBwIXgAAKCRC3hiaI/602pGDI AP9GfNc0NPyaagg2mEE1qej3VVSppxhOuySa0mIFkcBxmwD/VDkLfxSJzUM1i9+H 9QS2j1ngKs8yrNJEz2NcG1R9Hg64OARnxBRgEgorBgEEAZdVAQUBAQdAxU3aRubQ 3+FH566rJ5Bn/S0bO+DhOC9x5u2h8HDknlIDAQgHiHgEGBYKACAWIQSaHKezsZcm 2FgcC5q3hiaI/602pAUCZ8QUYAIbDAAKCRC3hiaI/602pHf4AP9TvI7jGUe81czA l9HGqMrpmx/Udl4Xgys4kZOPPQPLLgEAzP3bYKJrdzVGpr7YL6eygP81PXu62eKm QTD+lnC8/gw= =vcFV -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- ```