After 6 years of silence, plus a month of downtime…

Now with 100% more containers and an all-new look!

Where have I been?

Busy with work mostly. After I last posted in 2019, I got very busy launching a proactive lateral movement risk assessment tool called “Impact” at Tanium. Then the pandemic hit, which put my public speaking adventures on pause, but didn’t make things any less busy. I, along with several colleagues, successfully launched Impact in June of 2020, and I transitioned from the Director of Product Management role I had at the time, to a Senior Director SME Lead role.

2020-2023

For the next couple years, I’d be responsible for as many as 6 products at once (Impact, Integrity Monitor, Reveal, Comply, and Risk), plus 4 shared services/components (Criticality, Directory Query, Index, and Recorder). As you can imagine, that much responsibility leaves little time for things like blogging.

Fast forward to November of 2022, a reorg changes my title to Director of Technical Product Management, and along with it my workload. Fewer products, but different responsibilities. For most of the next year, I’d manage only 2 products (File Integrity Monitor and Reveal), and 2 shared components (Index and Recorder).

2023-2025

In the 4th quarter of 2023, I, along with 3 other colleagues would finally be awarded a patent for Impact that was filed back in 2019 when we first started working on it (#brain4life). Another reorg brought yet another change in responsibilities. I helped launch Tanium’s newest product at the time, called “Investigate”, and became the Product Manager for Impact once again.

After another reorg in February of 2025, “Technical” was dropped from my title, changing it to just “Director of Product Management”. There was never any distinction between “TPM” and “PM” at the company anyway, everyone had to do the same work no matter which title you had.

Halloween morning, October 31st, 2025, brought the biggest change yet. After 7.5 years at Tanium, I was unexpectedly laid off. There’s a surprising number of things that have to get done after a layoff. It’s a busier time than you might expect.

Getting back online

A series of odd coincidences took my blog offline the first week of November. First there was a Cloudflare outage, then something happened with my ISP that prevented inbound traffic from reaching my network. After several weeks of back and forth trying to figure it out, the ISP issue was resolved, inbound traffic was finally hitting my router, but still not reaching my webserver.

After a little more troubleshooting, I discovered that a recent update to my Unifi Dream Machine Pro SE had migrated firewall policies to their new Zone Firewall feature. My webserver was connected to a Unifi Aggregation Pro switch (a Layer 3 switch) and set to use it as its router. Apparently, Ubiquiti didn’t think to support Zone assignments when using one of their Layer 3 switches as a router. After changing the network configuration to use the UDM Pro SE as the router, I was able to assign the network the webserver was on to a zone.

Goodbye LAMP, Hello Docker!

When I first started my blog way back in 2011, I built it on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) VM, based on CentOS 6 with Drupal. After an upgrade to CentOS 7, and the famous “Drupalgeddon” vulnerability, I moved it to WordPress.

The LAMP VM migrated between various different physical hosts and hypervisors over the years and underwent several upgrades. Even though I wasn’t actively posting, I was trying to keep it online and up to date, as it’s always had a steady flow of traffic. Its final iteration before containerization was a CentOS 9 running on TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.

While troubleshooting the series of coincidences that took the blog offline, I decided to migrate it to an “App” (Docker Container) on my TrueNAS SCALE server. This should greatly simplify maintenance. I also decided to update the look and feel.

Unfortunately, images failed to migrate, so some older posts may have broken image links. I still have the images and will manually fix them as time permits. However, because it mostly posts that don’t get a lot of traffic that have broken image links, I’m not in any rush.

What’s next?

Jobwise, I don’t know yet. As of the time of this post, I’m still unemployed, which is a strange new thing for me. I have some interviews in-progress, but between end of year financials and the holidays, it’s very slow going. I expect things to pick up after New Years. I’m also exploring the possibility of founding my own startup.

As far as the blog is concerned, expect to see more posts, but on a new variety of topics. I’ve been away from Exchange for quite some time, so there will be less of that. Instead, you can expect to see more on Cybersecurity, Product Management, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence, so stay tuned!