I’ve Installed Nextcloud… Now What?

I’ve been woefully neglecting this blog for FAR too long. Life has been quite busy and honestly, I just haven’t made proper time for it. It’s been so long in fact, I had to archive out of date posts and I’ve not even posted once about Nextcloud. It is a shame on my part because…

Fortigate Firewall Debug

In one of my work environments we use Fortigate firewalls. With a complex rule-set, including multiple VDOMs, there are times where we need to figure out why some traffic (source) is not reaching its destination. We had such a case recently, and I wrote this up for documentation, sharing is caring :). I’ve changed the…

Cisco ASA to Redundant Amazon Virtual Gateways

As part of my day to day duties as a “Systems Administrator”, I configure site-to-site VPN tunnels from my company’s hosted devices, to remote endpoints of all types. The most common scenario being IPSec VPN tunnels, with the endpoints on my side being a Fortigate and Cisco ASA devices. Our team has done well over…

MS TechEd 2013

This year I was given the opportunity to attend and experience TechEd North America in New Orleans June 2-6. This was my first time attending and I was not quite sure what to expect. Could the assembling of so many nerds in one city be a good idea? As it turns out, this is an awesome idea.

 

The trip didn’t get off to the smoothest start. On Sunday I was set to take a flight from Charlotte > Houston > New Orleans. Unfortunately the flight departing Charlotte was delayed for 30 minutes and ended up being about two hours delayed in total. When you’ve got a connecting flight, the last thing you want is a delay of your first flight; however, during this time I started making conversation with the only other person headed to New Orleans, who was also heading to TechEd. I was chatting with Brien Posey. I didn’t know it at the time, but he is a 10-time MVP and freelance technical writer. We had a nice conversation, he’s a great guy, and after looking around a bit I’ve read some of his articles I just didn’t place the name with the articles when we were talking.

 

The flight from Houston > New Orleans was also delayed, but when we landed I only had 20 minutes to catch the flight, no time for lunch! Once aboard I jumped in on a conversation between Brien and a Duke Energy employee, turns out the Duke Employee knows a good friend of mine who also works at Duke in Charlotte on the Active Directory team. It’s a small world. Before I knew it I was in New Orleans and getting dropped off at the Renaissance Pere Marquette.