A Simple Man, A Complex Mind

All humans are an unfinished masterpiece.

So I’m not much of a writer as evident by the state of my blog. I’m going to try to rectify that over the next few months as I am trying to find new (or old) outlets in my life in order to express myself.

Hi Guys, I’m still settling in to my new apartment. I have not be able to get internet yet, but I haven’t forgotten about this place. I have been busy unpacking, and planning a 6 week trip to my hometown to visit family which will begin this weekend. In November I took a quick boot […]

What is SDDL? SDDL stands for “Security Descriptor Definition Language”, the definition from Microsoft “The security descriptor definition language (SDDL) defines the string format that the ConvertSecurityDescriptorToStringSecurityDescriptor and ConvertStringSecurityDescriptorToSecurityDescriptor functions use to describe a security descriptor as a text string. The language also defines string elements for describing information in the components of a security […]

With security being on the top of everyone’s mind these days. We come to a point where we have to consider extra security for our servers. Over the weekend I decided to add Google Authenticator’s PAM module to my web servers as an added layer of security. What is Google Authenticator? The Google Authenticator project […]

At work, even though I support Windows Servers by profession, I choose to use a Linux OS on my desktop/laptop. I have to admit that when I started at RackSpace SSL certs were not my strong suite. By now after almost a year and a half, I have had to generate a ton of SSL […]

A simple script I found to help see which databases have been restored recently, good thing to check if you are troubleshooting SQL 2005/2008 backup issues. SELECT [rs].[destination_database_name], [rs].[restore_date], [bs].[backup_start_date], [bs].[backup_finish_date], [bs].[database_name] as [source_database_name], [bmf].[physical_device_name] as [backup_file_used_for_restore] FROM msdb..restorehistory rs INNER JOIN msdb..backupset bs ON [rs].[backup_set_id] = [bs].[backup_set_id] INNER JOIN msdb..backupmediafamily bmf ON [bs].[media_set_id] = […]

From the title you know this is going to be a sensitive issue. I’ll try go easy on it. Recently i was put into a situation where the company I work for hired a new person. This said person needed special software in order to do to his/her job. The owner of the company politely […]

At my current job, I got the pleasure to get acquainted with a VOIP system. I’ve had VOIP phones before at previous companies, but they were usually managed by the “experts’. So managing, and learning to manage this system i have to say has been a learning curve. One issue i have been trying to […]