EST. 2026 — Notes from real server work SYSADMIN · SECURITY · AI · DIRECTADMIN Issue 01
THE SYSADMIN ALMANAC
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5 articles
Network / VPN
Migrating an Old .aspx Site to a JSON Catalog and Filtering Images
Web

Migrating an Old .aspx Site to a JSON Catalog and Filtering Images

The owner of an old .aspx site asked me to rebuild it, but more than a decade of content was in a database I could no longer access. I collected the pages from the site itself to build a JSON catalog that preserved every legacy_id, then wrote a three-layer image filter to keep stray QR codes from becoming article covers.

#python#web-scraping#crawler#migration
10 min read·23 Oct
Build APM on Windows, Part 3: Apache httpd 2.4.69 with CMake
Web

Build APM on Windows, Part 3: Apache httpd 2.4.69 with CMake

Build APR, APR-util, httpd 2.4.69 and mod_fcgid with CMake and Ninja on Windows. Explain why each option is set, use dumpbin to find the DLLs needed beside httpd.exe, prevent links to debug DLLs, and test the config with httpd -t.

#apache#windows#web-server#cpp
14 min read·22 Oct
A Cookie Banner That Loads GTM and GA4 Only After Consent
Web

A Cookie Banner That Loads GTM and GA4 Only After Consent

Most cookie banners look good but block nothing, because GTM and GA4 have already loaded from the first line of the page. This article covers a setup that loads the container only after acceptance, puts GA4 inside GTM to prevent double counting, hides AdSense slots initially, and checks that outgoing requests to those services stay at zero.

#seo#adsense#javascript#playwright
9 min read·18 Oct
Reading ID Cards from the Web with a Localhost Agent
Hardware

Reading ID Cards from the Web with a Localhost Agent

Browsers cannot access smart card readers directly. A workable approach is to write a small agent that opens a port on localhost and let the web page call it. This article covers secure contexts, CORS preflight, port conflicts with other agents, PC/SC in SHARED mode, decoding TIS-620 manually, and the day antivirus flagged the program as a backdoor.

#hardware#cpp#windows#gui
11 min read·16 Oct
AdSense Says ads.txt Is Missing: Tracing the Logs Layer by Layer
Network

AdSense Says ads.txt Is Missing: Tracing the Logs Layer by Layer

The AdSense Sites page reports ads.txt as "Not found" even though the file exists and is correct — a forensic investigation using curl + access logs to prove, layer by layer, whether Googlebot visited and what it received. Case closed: nothing was blocking it; Google's own status was stale.

#adsense#nginx#cloudflare#logging
9 min read·8 Jul