Documenting the IT Journey
Thoughts, tutorials, and updates from my journey
What it means to be a security-first IT support professional, with a worked example of securing a personal VPS and tenant, identity-based controls, defence in depth, AI-driven social engineering, network and physical controls, and how to deliver great support without adding friction
Why the security attributed to NAT is a side effect of state and policy rather than translation, with a packet-level flow through pfSense, why RFC1918 and bogon blocking are still required, and how ALGs bind firewall pinholes to payload content
Resetting a forgotten local account password on Windows 11 and Windows Server using the utilman.exe swap in WinRE, including BitLocker gating, Server and Server Core variants, and Domain Controller exceptions
Install guide for UniFi OS Server on Debian and Ubuntu, covering Podman dependencies, the installer binary, service management, port changes from Network Server, and migration from the legacy controller
Direct install guide for the self-hosted UniFi Network Application on Debian and Ubuntu, covering repository setup, MongoDB and Java dependencies, firewall ports, device adoption, and backups
Single-user PowerShell data preservation tool for pre-reimage and pre-swap workflows. NVMe-tuned Robocopy wrapper that captures profile data, browser state, OneDrive sync roots, Sage data, and Recycle Bins into a labelled folder structure on an external drive.
