Latest posts
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ServiceNow ACC ERROR_040: Port 443 Was Open, but HTTPS Still Failed
ServiceNow ACC ERROR_040 appeared when I tried to bring back an agent that ITOM was showing as down. The installer reported that it couldn’t fetch a version file from the MID Server. TCP 443 was reachable, but the HTTPS request failed during certificate validation. I started with connectivity checks and narrowed it down to the…
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Remove PHP-FPM on a Zabbix Server? The Dry Run Listed 23 Packages
In part one, I upgraded PHP on the Zabbix web server after PHP2Shell. The database servers and proxies had PHP packages installed too. On one database server, PHP-FPM was installed but not running, and I considered whether to remove PHP-FPM instead of patching it. A dry run listed 23 packages, so I didn’t. Nothing was removed…
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Zabbix PHP Upgrade After PHP2Shell: PHP 8.0.30 to 8.3.36
Two days after PHP2Shell was disclosed, I started a Zabbix PHP upgrade by reviewing PHP across our monitoring environment. On the web server, dnf check-update ‘php*’ returned no available updates, so before deciding anything I looked at the repository configuration. This post covers how I scoped the review, why the update list was empty, and how I…
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One Database Server Crashed. The Other Took Over in Seconds.
Around 4:37 a.m. on June 25, 2026, the primary database server behind our manufacturing execution system crashed with a blue screen. Database server failover to the standby completed within a minute, and production kept running. This post covers the timeline, what the crash dump pointed to, and a decision I found more interesting than the…
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The iDRAC Was Healthy. Nobody Told Us the Password Changed.
The iDRAC login failed with two words and nothing else: “Login Failed.” There was no other message and no indication of what had changed. The ESXi hosts were running normally, and iDRAC itself was reachable. What made it more confusing was that the original password still worked on one of the four hosts. What I…
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The Server Couldn’t Reach Red Hat. It Took Three Network Changes to Fix.
One RHEL 8.7 server couldn’t establish a Red Hat subscription connection, while a comparable server in the same environment worked normally. Fixing the first network issue didn’t solve it. It only changed the symptom: no TCP, then TCP without TLS, then a working subscription connection with dnf makecache still failing. This is the incident in that order.…
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The Patching Was Finished. The Reboot Wasn’t.
Our summer shutdown ran for about two weeks across several different production schedules. Most of the work went as planned. One reboot didn’t. We didn’t realize we had a missed reboot until a temp folder problem that should have disappeared after remediation kept coming back. The hard part of the shutdown was not the patching.…
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The Agent Was Installed and Running. It Had Never Connected.
ServiceNow ACC not connected: that was the state of one of our servers for months, while the Agent Client Collector service showed Running the whole time. The cause was one config line: backend-url pointed at 127.0.0.1, because DNS could not resolve the MID server address during install. The symptom: Running, but never connected On the…
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Transfer California Driver License to Georgia: What the DDS Visit Actually Took
My DDS visit to transfer California driver license to Georgia took about 15 minutes, but I spent more time before it checking my documents than I did at the counter. I walked in without an appointment about 30 minutes before closing, there was no line, and I left with a paper temporary license. I’m writing…
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My California Real ID Driver License: Six Weeks, Two DMV Visits, One Borrowed Car
Getting my California Real ID driver license took about six weeks, two DMV visits, and eventually a coworker’s car. The paperwork wasn’t the hardest part. Finding a car and a licensed passenger for the road test was. I had never lived in the US before, so this was a first-time application, not a transfer. In…