All articles

Artificial Intelligence Advanced

Building RAG Pipelines That Survive Production

Retrieval-augmented generation demos beautifully and fails quietly. The gap between a notebook that answers questions about ten PDFs and a system that serves an entire organisation is not model quality — it is retrieval...

27 Jul 2026 7 min read 2K

Product Reviews Intermediate

MikroTik CCR2004 Review: Eight Months in Production

The CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS occupies an unusual position: twelve SFP+ ports and two SFP28 ports in a 1U chassis, at roughly a fifth of the price of the equivalent from a mainstream vendor. I have run a pair for eight months a...

23 Jul 2026 5 min read 2K

Virtualization Intermediate

Proxmox VE Cluster Design That Survives Failure

Proxmox VE has moved from homelab curiosity to a genuine vSphere alternative, and Broadcom's licensing changes accelerated that considerably. But a Proxmox cluster designed like a vSphere cluster will disappoint you in s...

20 Jul 2026 6 min read 4K

Tutorials Beginner

Lab: Build an Active Directory Environment on Hyper-V

This lab builds a working Active Directory environment on Hyper-V: two domain controllers, a member server, and a client, on an isolated network. It is the foundation for practising Group Policy, certificate services, re...

16 Jul 2026 5 min read 4K

Networking Advanced

BGP Multihoming for the Enterprise Edge

Multihoming with BGP is the point where enterprise networking stops being configuration and starts being policy. The protocol is simple; the failure modes are political, and they usually surface at 3am during a partial u...

12 Jul 2026 6 min read 3K

Cybersecurity Intermediate

Zero Trust Network Access: A Realistic Rollout

"Zero trust" has been marketed into near-meaninglessness. Underneath the vendor material is a genuinely useful principle: stop granting access based on network location. Being on the corporate LAN should confer no more p...

5 Jul 2026 6 min read 4K

Database Intermediate

PostgreSQL Index Strategy That Actually Works

Most "PostgreSQL is slow" tickets are an indexing problem, and most indexing problems come from adding indexes by intuition rather than by reading the plan. This is the method I use, and the specific index types that sol...

28 Jun 2026 6 min read 6K

Automation Intermediate

Terraform Module Design That Scales

Terraform makes it easy to create infrastructure and surprisingly hard to keep a large codebase maintainable. The problems show up around the eighteen-month mark: modules nobody dares change, state files that take twenty...

20 Jun 2026 6 min read 4K

VoIP Intermediate

Diagnosing VoIP Call Quality Properly

"The calls are bad" is the least actionable ticket in unified communications. Bad how? For whom? In which direction? Almost every VoIP quality investigation that drags on for weeks does so because nobody separated the sy...

13 Jun 2026 6 min read 3K

Storage Intermediate

ZFS for Production Storage

ZFS has a reputation for being complicated. It is not — it has a small number of decisions that are permanent, and a larger number that are trivially changeable. Knowing which is which is most of the skill. The permanent...

6 Jun 2026 6 min read 4K

Cloud Advanced

AWS Landing Zone Foundations

The decisions you make in an AWS account's first month determine how painful the next three years are. Landing zone work is unglamorous, invisible when done well, and extremely expensive to retrofit. This covers the foun...

30 May 2026 5 min read 5K

Linux Intermediate

systemd Service Hardening

Most Linux services run with far more privilege than they need. systemd includes a sandboxing framework that removes most of it declaratively — no container runtime, no separate tooling, just directives in a unit file. T...

22 May 2026 5 min read 4K