Infrastructure Engineering: Systems, Networking, Databases & the Internet
36 views
Network architecture, internet protocols, database and systems design, and the infrastructure engineering decisions that determine whether real production systems hold up under load.
Why Tech Empires Fall: Arrogance, Control & Collapse
1. Arrogance Is the Drawbridge Every great empire in history has been brought low by a version of the same mistake. The fortress is so strong, the moat so wide, and the walls so high, that the people inside begin to believe they have transcended the rules. They stop serving the people beyond the walls. […]
Read more →Mac Terminal: Scan TLS Certificates with NMAP and SSLScan
The below script will give you basic information on a websites certificate: NMAP is provides a simple way to get a list of available ciphers from a host website / server. Additionally, nmap provides a strength rating of strong, weak, or unknown for each available cipher. First, download the ssl-enum-ciphers.nse nmap script (explanation here). Then from the same […]
Read more →How to Find Who Mentions You Online Using Google
If you publish online, you should periodically search for yourself, not out of ego but out of discipline. The internet is an echo system, and if you do not measure where your ideas travel, you are operating blind. You want to know who is linking to you, who is quoting you, who is criticising you, […]
Read more →Mac Routing Table: Redirect Website Traffic to en0
This was a hard article to figure out the title for! Put simply, your mac book has a route table and if you want to move a specific IP address or dns from one interface to another, then follow the steps below: First find the IP address of the website that you want to re-route […]
Read more →Monitor Critical DNS Records for Changes Using Batch Script
If you have tier 1 services that are dependant on a few DNS records, then you may want a simple batch job to monitor these dns records for changes or deletion. The script below contains an example list of DNS entries (replace these records for the ones you want to monitor).
Read more →
Why Bank Architecture Determines Resilience More Than Size
1. Size Was Once Mistaken for Stability For most of modern banking history, stability was assumed to increase with size. The thinking was the bigger you are, the more you should care, the more resources you can apply to problems. Larger banks had more capital, more infrastructure, and more people. In a pre-cloud world, this […]
Read more →Fix DNS Issues Using dig and whois on Mac OS X
When debugging DNS issues its important to verify the local DNS response with the authoritive DNS nameserver. With dig we can directly query the authoritative name servers for a domain, these are the DNS servers that hold the authoritative records for the domains DNS zone; the source of truth. If a correct response is received […]
Read more →NMAP + Claude MCP: 20 Vulnerability Scans on macOS
Introduction NMAP (Network Mapper) is one of the most powerful and versatile network scanning tools available for security professionals, system administrators, and ethical hackers. When combined with Claude through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), it becomes an even more powerful tool, allowing you to leverage AI to intelligently analyze scan results, suggest scanning strategies, and […]
Read more →Fix FOIT with font-display: swap to Boost Core Web Vitals
Stop Waiting for Fonts Quick Guide to font-display: swap on macOS Your website might be secretly blocking page renders while it waits for fancy custom fonts to load. This invisible delay tanks your Core Web Vitals and frustrates users. The fix is simple: font-display: swap. Here’s how to audit your sites and fix it in […]
Read more →SYN Flood Testing With hping3: Parallel Processes Guide
A SYN flood test using hping3 that allows you to specify the number of SYN packets to send and scales horizontally with a specific number of processes can be created using a Bash script with the xargs command. This approach allows you to distribute the workload across multiple processes for better performance. The Script This […]
Read more →
NTTFB: Net Time to First Byte Explained and Why It Matters
Andrew Baker · February 2026 · andrewbaker.ninja 1 The Problem with TTFB Time to First Byte has been the go to diagnostic for server responsiveness since the early days of web performance engineering. Google’s own web.dev guidance describes TTFB as measuring the elapsed time between the start of navigation and when the first byte of […]
Read more →SYN Flood Testing with hping3: A Practical Guide
Getting an application knocked out with a simple SYN flood is both embarrassing and avoidable. Its also very easy to create a SYN flood and so its something you should design against. Below is the hping3 command line that I use to test my services against SYN floods. I have used quite a few mods, […]
Read more →