CozyNet Blog

Monday Journal (20260713)

Publish Date: 2026-07-14

This is my first journal entry of the month. Like I said in the previous blog post, I'm going to give this a try for roughly a month and see what I think about it by the end. I'm writing this one in recount of events from yesterday.

Starting with the morning at 6AM, it was my usual routine. I made up some oatmeal in a pot with a little cinnamon, brown sugar sprinkled in, butter, and a slice of toast and jam. After that I tended to the cats and dog, packed a lunch, got dressed up then headed out the door to work.

At work, there were a few things lined up for me in the morning coming off of last week. One of those was addressing some detected software vulnerabilities for Visual Studio Code installed on a few Linux workstations.

I had to figure out why it wasn't being patched, along side other missing security patches for other workstations. I quickly discovered that whoever deployed vscode to these workstations didn't do it correctly and failed to include the required APT source repo, so that was an easy fix.

The next problem was with some older workstations running Ubuntu 16.04 due to some legacy business software. They were setup with the Extended Maintenance Support from Canonical, but that support just ended back in April... I reached out to a contact at Cononical and was recommend the "Legacy add-on" extension, but I'm still waiting to hear if the company wants to proceed with this or not.

After that, I had to address another security finding wherein the autoplay / autorun feature of Windows wasn't being disabled by policy. This was because Crowdstrike (a glorified antivirus) was setup to whitelist the mounting of external media to only a special hardware encrypted disk (Apricorn) and would block everything else, so who cares about some silly autoplay policy when the devices are already being filtered. Well this didn't satisfy the rubber stamp legal eagle bureaucrats so I had to setup a device policy in Intune just to make them happy. This is a small part of why I don't like Windows since it presents a "policy framework" layer along side a hundred thousand busy-work defaults to raise a royal stink over, despite it not always being relevant and often times inaccurate anyhow. Oh well, I got em off my back!

Next up on my plate was taking over (or rather, recovering) a patch management role of a few additional servers. I use to manage the WSUS instance for all of the on-prem Microsoft systems, but as those were gradually decommed and replaced by Intune managed laptops, the WSUS server was eventually scrapped since the remaining on-prem servers (A domain controller, an RDS server, and one other system) were the only things remaining and the company wanted to move to Qualys for managing security patching on them. Personally I didn't mind WSUS, albeit it was running on Server 2012 with no plans to upgrade it, so hacking it to work with Windows 10 and 11 endpoints was a chore; but it worked. It was more native to the remaining servers than Qualys, but oh well.

So during that time, there was a handover of patch management to oddly enough the rack space provider. I don't know what they were thinking, but I suspect they weren't thinking at all (apparently they were offering this as part of their support). It caused some conflict and confusion at first, especially between the licensing and who was going to use who's Qualys service. Recently the rack space provider decided to pull out of all managed support and so now it's back in my hands again. It was all so clunky and silly, but I'm fixing it up and will get it automated soon enough.

Besides work, I've been doing a book study in my spare time. It's part of a pamphlet written by my church that includes a lot of scripture and some explanations on things.

I've been writing down a lot of notes since I find it helps me to internalize what I'm studying. It's been working out great, but my little finger hates it. I don't know if its some sort of arthritis or what, but the middle knuckle of my little finger is very sensitive. I measured it with my calipers back home to discover it's larger than the knuckle on my left hand little finger! It's kind of funky shaped looking to me too... I don't know, but I hope it isn't arthritis and that its simply because of me writing too much.

I'm still working to recover my domain registrar account. I can sign into it and do everything I need to, but in the event I might have to do something with the email account tied to it, I would be hosed. After some back and forth with Gandi, including sending them pictures and signed documents, it looks like I'm on track to getting the primary email changed for the account.

I think it's silly that I have to go thru this circus act performance and should be able to simply change it myself, but I don't have a choice and thankfully it's looking good. Their support at least seems competent.

I also found another good use case of Nextcloud during all of this too as a file transfer security service between emails instead of relying on conventional attachments. I don't like sending PII documents in email attachments, but a password protected random generated link to an online document store is really nifty!

This is actually quite a common practice among financial businesses as a secure B2B file transfer service for confidential documents in emails, so having my own self hosted B2B service is fantastic.

After work I went to the grocery store and bought some grub to cook back home. It was a quick meal type of night, so I made up some Hamburger Helper, boiled Zucchini, and had it with a slice of bread on the side.

As I was washing the dishes, my cats were jumping and scratching at a window in their room trying to get a small frog. After one especially loud bang, I thought they broke something, so I taped up cardboard over the window to keep them from messing around with it anymore.

Shortly after taking my bath, I went to bed by 10:30PM. I've been shooting for 10PM on the spot these last few weeks here, but 10:30 was alright. I also try to keep away from my computer by 7PM too which has helped to keep my mind off of it well before going to bed. If I'm not washing dishes or taking a bath, I spend the time reading a book to unwind.

Other than work and my book study, I didn't spend much time on my computer outside of those two things. According to ActivityWatch, I spent about an hour and a half on my computer between reading articles in my feed reader, a few blogs in the browser, and addressing some emails. The book study was three hours (it's an ebook, not a physical pamphlet by the way) between reading, typing notes which I transcribed into my notebook, and looking up Bible scripture.

I feel like that was a three hours well spent rather than it being toward something else, like YouTube.

That's all I have for this journal entry. I won't be closing out the rest of my journals like this, but wanted to say that I don't intend for every journal entry to be as long as this one. I just had a lot to write about I suppose!

Also I'm not yet sure if I'll consistently write one each day.

Thanks for reading my blog!