Eight Okta Users, and Everything That Changed Around Them
I opened the Okta provider expecting to write the ten-user post again with better numbers. The eight users are the same eight users. Nearly everything around them has been replaced.
DevOps
Adding a FreeIPA Replica When the Only Spare Host Runs Ubuntu
Every login in the house resolved against one thin client, and the only spare machine ran Ubuntu. The second server became a container, and a bad image tag left me a replica that looked healthy.
Letting Caddy Own the Certificates
Certbot on a timer, a deploy hook, and a Discord webhook whose only job was to tell me when the other two broke. Caddy does that work itself, so I moved the front door and deleted the rest.
Moving This Blog From Ghost to Hugo Without Changing a Single Post URL
Three hundred dollars a year for Ghost(Pro) to host forty posts, with a members list four rows long and one of them me. I was paying for a CMS to serve what had always been a static site. Moving it to Hugo on Azure Static Web Apps changed not one post URL.
WMIC Is Gone. Here Is What To Use Instead
A utility script died on a fresh Windows 11 box. wmic bios get serialnumber, gone, and the DISM command that puts it back stops working this month. The one-liners map onto Get-CimInstance cleanly. The for /f blocks wrapped around them do not.
Raising the Copilot Standards to Pester 6.1
Pester 6.1 shipped, so I checked my Copilot standards against an install instead of the release notes. Four claims no longer held. Two aren’t in the announcement at all, and one example from the release notes doesn’t actually run.
Seeding an Okta Test Tenant When You Only Get Ten Users
A fresh Okta trial org is empty. The licence caps you at ten active users, so I built a lab where 8 awkward users plus everything Okta doesn’t cap does the work. Seeds in 2 min, tears down safely.
Keeping Copilot Instructions in Sync Across Repositories
Updated my PowerShell Copilot Standards repo and realized every other project was still on the old instruction copies. So I built a GitHub Actions workflow that mirrors them weekly and opens a PR when they drift.
Beyond Basic Secrets: Building a Universal PowerShell Secret Management Module
One PowerShell module that talks to SecretStore, Azure Key Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Bitwarden and CredMan through the same commands, so hybrid environments stop needing five different scripts.
From Plain Text Passwords to PowerShell SecretStore: Securing Your AD Test Environment
My AD test environment module still had service account passwords sitting in plain text. This adds PowerShell SecretStore for setup, storage and retrieval, without making the lab harder to spin up.