Infrastructure Engineering: Systems, Networking, Databases & the Internet
Network architecture, internet protocols, database and systems design, and the infrastructure engineering decisions that determine whether real production systems hold up under load.
The Legacy Choice: Why x86 in the Data Centre Is Now an Expensive Decision, Not a Default
The economics crossed the tipping point quietly. Most enterprises missed it. The ones who noticed are not going back. 1. How Defaults Become Legacy Every technology that eventually becomes legacy spent years being the obvious choice. Nobody chose x86 over anything. It was simply there, it worked, the tooling was built around it, the hiring […]
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What Is My IP Address? IPv4 Explained for Beginners
Firstly, let me acknowledge that there are lots of these kinds of posts on the internet. But the reason why i wrote this blog is that I wanted to force myself to consolidate the various articles I have read and my learnt knowledge in this space. I will probably update this article several times and […]
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Browser curl Wrapper: Bypass Bot Filters, Load Test, and Defeat TLS Fingerprinting
WordPress Plugin Crashed Your Site: Restore From Backup Instead You updated a plugin five minutes ago. Maybe it was a security patch. Maybe you were trying a new caching layer. You clicked “Update Now,” saw the progress bar fill, got the green tick, and moved on with your day. Now the site is down. Not […]
Read more →Fix SSH WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED
If the fingerprint of your remote host changes you will see the following error message appear: There are many ways to fix this. The easiest of which is simply to delete your “known_hosts” file. This will mean you just need to accept new finger prints on all your SSH hosts. Yes, this is very lazy…
Read more →HTTP/2 Rapid Reset CVE-2023-44487: Test Your Server on macOS
Introduction In August 2023, a critical zero day vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol was disclosed that affected virtually every HTTP/2 capable web server and proxy. Known as HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE 2023 44487), this vulnerability enabled attackers to launch devastating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks with minimal resources. Google reported mitigating the largest DDoS […]
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Migrating a Pi 5 WordPress Stack from SD Card to NVMe
I run a full WordPress stack on a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting on my desk: MariaDB, PHP-FPM, Nginx, and Redis, all inside Docker containers, served publicly through a Cloudflare tunnel. After fitting an NVMe SSD via the Pi 5 HAT+, the obvious next step was getting Docker off the SD card entirely. The SD card […]
Read more →Scan Your Local Network With Nikto and Nmap on macOS
Nikto is becoming one of my favourite tools. I like it because of its wide ranging use cases and its simplicity. So whats an example use case for Nikto? When I am bored right now and so I am going to hunt around my local network and see what I can find… Now lets pop […]
Read more →What Is Minification and How to Test If It Works
1. What is Minification Minification is the process of removing everything from source code that a browser does not need to execute it. This includes whitespace, line breaks, comments, and long variable names. The resulting file is functionally identical to the original but significantly smaller. A CSS file written for human readability might look like […]
Read more →SEO and AEO Page Audit Script: A Technical Guide
Search engines no longer operate alone. Your content is now consumed byGoogle, Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of otherAI driven systems that crawl the web and extract answers. Classic SEO focuses on ranking. Modern discovery also requires AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) which focuses on being understood and extracted by AI systems. A marketing […]
Read more →qwinsta & rwinsta: Manage Remote Terminal Sessions
I regularly administer Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 machine using Terminal Services. In W2K I use Terminal Services in Administration mode and in W2K3 I use Remote Desktop. Basically this is the same thing but it’s packaged a bit differently on the two OSes. In both situations there are only 2 users allowed […]
Read more →K8GB: Cloud Native GSLB for Kubernetes Explained
Today I am a happy bunny!!!! Yury Tsarev (a very clever dude) did a presentation to one of the Kubernetes co-founders Tim Hockin. The demo was one of absa banks opensource projects called K8GB (a cloud native GSLB for K8s): https://www.k8gb.io/ Why do I like K8GB? Because it uses a single CRD that integrates to […]
Read more →Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC Email Security DNS Records
There are three basic ways to secure email, these are: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) definitions. Lets quickly discuss these before we talk about how to check if they have been setup: SPF helps prevent spoofing by verifying the sender’s IP address SPF (Sender […]
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