My personal site and blog
I was struggling recently with decrypting LibreOffice documents that had been encrypted using LibreOffice s Encrypt with GPG key option. I generally use GPG on the command line, have a minimal set of packages installed on my host system, and don t really enjoy a command line activity suddenly popping up an unexpected graphical window, so I [ ]
I m really delighted and honoured to have been included in this list Computing.co.uk s Rising Stars 2025! Over the past year, he has revolutionised the charity’s observability, teaching himself Zabbix, an open source monitoring tool. His custom scripts now proactively detect and resolve issues before they can have an impact, significantly reducing both downtime and [ ]
When monitoring network switches that have end-user-facing ports, such as desk ports, it is excessively noisy to monitor these for conditions like this port has gone down! . There are a few approaches one can take to addressing this issue, one of which is to set macros on the host which mark each port as not [ ]
In this blog post, we’ll be: configuring a virtual network topology in Azure in the “hub and spoke model” deploying an example resource (a Key Vault) in our spoke network restricting access to the Key Vault using a private endpoint connection so that it is only accessible inside the vnet configuring a DNS forwarder running [ ]
Azure SQL Database’s point in time restore and long term retention are solid backup options, of which you’d have every reasonable expectation for a PaaS service! However, Microsoft’s documentation is abundantly clear that, at the time of writing, there is no support for immutable backups via this method. If you actually need to achieve immutable [ ]
If you have at some point enabled Microsoft’s Cloud Update in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, and later want to update a device managed in this way to Current Channel (Preview) or the beta channel, you may find yourself tearing your hair out wondering why a separate Group Policy/Intune/registry based instruction to switch to [ ]
Ingesting data from Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access into a SIEM is a valuable technique for identifying risky endpoint activity or system compromise. It also gives you a (hopefully) immutable1 copy of this audit data to support a post-incident investigation. I’ve been able to configure both Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access [ ]
The Symptom Users were experiencing a 5-15 second delay when saving a document to OneDrive or SharePoint, during which Word would show as not responding . All machines in question use App Control for Business (WDAC). The Cause During the not responding period, Word is attempting to start the Web Client service, which is set to [ ]
Running a bleeding-edge rolling release Linux distribution like Arch Linux has its challenges and risks, but there is perhaps no greater feeling of absolute control over your own operating system! It also leads to the opportunity to have “adventures” like the one described here. While “adventure” might be tongue-in-cheek, the truth is that there is [ ]
Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/person-wearing-black-leather-shoes-VUWDlBXGogg by Fallon Michael I frequently SSH into various systems from my primary Linux machine. There is an analogous issue to too many browser tabs that exists here having too many SSH sessions open in different terminal tabs! There is a risk in these cases of accidentally typing a higher-privileged sudo password [ ]