Why this site exists
Small offices run on one IT person or a contractor who drives in. This site is written for them.
Most IT advice online is written for companies with an IT department. Somebody owns the firewall, somebody else owns identity, and there’s a budget line for compliance consultants.
That isn’t how it works in a county courthouse, a small-town police department, or a community bank with four branches. There’s usually one person, or a managed service provider covering a dozen clients from a pickup truck, and that person owns everything: the domain controllers, the phones, the audit, and the printer that jams every Tuesday.
What you’ll find here
Write-ups of real problems and how they got solved, with the client details scrubbed out:
- Getting ready for CJIS and LEADS technical security audits, and what the auditors actually ask for
- Retiring old domain controllers and cleaning up Active Directory that’s been “temporarily” patched for a decade
- Locking down phone systems that are quietly exposed to the internet
- Networks, building systems, and the odd places they overlap
If something here doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your environment, it probably means your environment is different, not that you’re doing it wrong. Test before you change production.
More articles are on the way.