Over the years I’ve written quite a bit about cryptography. PKI, certificates, trust chains, identity, and even a deep dive into Diffie–Hellman key exchange. All fairly technical topics, and topics I genuinely enjoy writing about. Yet there was always something missing.
Continue readingCategory: Cloud
Update 26-12-2025: Uploaded new and improved PowerShell scripts to GitHub. Added Windows 11, Ubuntu Server & Ubuntu Desktop to the repository.
In June 2023, I wrote a blog about the principle of clean source. At its core, clean source is about knowing exactly what you are using as the foundation of your installations, and automating that process so the outcome is predictable and repeatable.
Back then, I relied on what we now have to call legacy tooling. While that approach still works, it was already showing its age. Tools like MDT have been deprecated for quite some time, and although community efforts try to keep them alive, it’s clear that this path is slowly coming to an end.
That realization pushed me to take a step back and ask a simple question: why not approach this from a DevOps mindset instead? As it turns out, that opened the door to some pretty cool possibilities.
Continue readingWhile automating my Proxmox environment with Packer, most of the workflow worked flawlessly: Ubuntu autoinstall, cloud-init, SSH provisioning, and qemu-guest-agent all behaved exactly as expected. But every build consistently failed at the very last step, converting the VM into a template, which was very annoying.
Despite the VM installing perfectly, Proxmox refused to stop it cleanly and returned a persistent lock-related error. This led to a surprisingly long troubleshooting process, which eventually revealed a simple root cause: stale lock files left behind from earlier interrupted builds……sigh
In this post, I’ll share the exact error, the steps I went through to diagnose it, and how cleaning up these old lock files immediately restored stable, repeatable builds, it’s been a few very long days…
Continue readingEarlier this year, I completed my bachelor thesis in Cybersecurity, diving into one of the most exciting developments in the world of authentication (well, that’s my personal opinion anyways), FIDO2 and Passkeys. My research focused on how passwordless authentication can reshape the way we secure digital identities, not only from a technical point of view, but also in terms of user experience, adoption , and the shift in mental models required to move beyond passwords.
Continue reading
I usually don’t focus on geopolitics, but the recent uncontrolled developments in cybersecurity, digital infrastructure, and artificial intelligence are too alarming to ignore. The recent shifts in the United States raise critical questions about Europe’s digital future and independence.
Continue reading
Today I’ve learned,
That even software and designs from quarter of a century ago still influence the modern Cloud enabled world. In this specific case I’m talking about the PowerBI gateway and how it operates in an on-prem Active Directory environment. Allow me to explain…
Have you ever wondered how to seamlessly connect your on-premises Active Directory with Entra ID? Well, you’re in the right place because today, I’m diving into Entra Connect, formerly known as Azure AD Connect. But hold on tight, because we’re not just talking about the basics; we’re here to make sure you install and configure it like a security pro!
Continue reading
I’ve been in this industry for 30 somewhat years and luckily every now and than I still learn something new. As I stepped into this world of blogging, I decided to try out static websites instead of simply using WordPress. Must admit I had a little too much fun discovering how all this stuff actually works, diving into Git CI/CD pipelines, learning the markdown language, setting up an Azure static website and combining it all. No worries, over time I will share all I can, but for today I’m going to concentrate on name resolution, a.k.a. DNS.
Continue reading