My New Work Laptop Was Not Quite What It Said on the Box
Setting up a business laptop the way I would for a client with Autopilot, Intune and Entra join, and what the laptop itself turned out to be hiding.
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Write-ups from home lab work and lessons learned.
The IT Field Manual, version 1.4
Three staged modules and a year-old wording bug went into the manual at once, because I decided against a version-bump chain that would leave v1.4 stale the day it shipped. What got added, what got corrected, and the placement call I made against my own source material's advice.
I Put a Server Cluster in My Basement
Three used office PCs, one new build, and two days where DNS did not work. Building a Proxmox cluster from scratch, including the parts I got wrong.
Create a "Second Brain" using Claude
How six Claude Projects that couldn't see each other turned into one folder Claude can read directly, why that finally makes 'second brain' mean something, and three mistakes I only found by running the system cold.
The IT Field Manual, version 1.3
Five days, three versions, and roughly 57,000 more words. What got added, what got corrected, and the one instruction in my own source material that I did not follow.
Three times in two days, a system told me it worked when it hadn't
A wildcard DNS record, an allow-list entry, and a DLP policy in simulation mode. Different products, same failure: the diagnostic still returned an answer, and the answer was wrong.
The IT Field Manual, version 1.0
Thirty-seven thousand words of operational reference, built around one rule: search the tag, not the prose. Here is why I stopped keeping notes and started keeping a manual.
I built a hybrid AD environment, tore it down, and built it again
Round 1 was tutorial-led and full of failures. Round 2 was a rebuild from my own playbook, timed, to find out whether the documentation actually worked.
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