The vi Cheat Sheet (2026 Edition): From Survival Keys to Power Moves
Manny FernandezIn this guide Executive Summary Prerequisites: Which vi Do You Actually Have? The Mental Model: vi Modes Opening, Saving, and...
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Sublime Text Quick Tip: Removing Empty Lines in Sublime Text: Regex, Selections, and a One-Key Plugin
Manny FernandezObjective: Strip blank and whitespace-only lines out of config dumps, log exports, and pasted CLI output in Sublime Text, either...
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Linux Permissions Deep Dive: rwx, Octal, Special Bits, ACLs, and Capabilities
Manny FernandezIn this guide Executive Summary Prerequisites and Architecture How the Kernel Decides: The Access Check Reading ls -l Like a...
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Linux User and Group Management and Permissions: The Practitioner’s Guide
Manny FernandezObjective: Build, manage, and audit Linux identities and file access the right way, from /etc/passwd to default ACLs, with every...
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Autoruns vs. Process Explorer vs. Process Monitor: When to Use Each, When Not To, and Whether They Are Still Alive
Manny FernandezObjective: Pick the right Sysinternals tool in the first minute of a Windows investigation instead of the fifth. Audience: SOC...
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macGREP, a grep building app for your macOS
Manny FernandezI have been playing with all forms of grep and decided to create an app that will assist in building...
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grep vs. egrep vs. fgrep: One Engine, Three Personalities
Manny FernandezExecutive Summary If you typed egrep out of muscle memory and got a warning back, this post is for you....
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macOS XProtect: How Apple’s Built-In Malware Defense Actually Works
Manny FernandezThree engines, two bundle locations, two update pipelines, and the commands to verify all of it Objective Understand every moving...
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ITsecur Firewall for Webmin: A Point-and-Click IPTables GUI
Manny Fernandez2026 refresh of the original IPTable Firewall GUI post | By Manny Fernandez In this guide Executive Summary Prerequisites and...
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Proxmox VE: Creating a User That Can Only Touch the VMs You Choose
Manny FernandezExecutive Summary Objective: Create a Proxmox VE user who logs in, sees only a specific set of virtual machines and...
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Red Team Tool Series: Nmap Zero to Hero: Install, Scan, and Tune Like a Practitioner
Manny FernandezIn this guide Executive Summary Prerequisites and Lab Architecture Installing Nmap on macOS Installing Nmap on Linux How Nmap Thinks:...
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FortiGate l2forward: Bridging Non-IP Frames in Transparent Mode (and Why It Does Nothing in NAT Mode)
Manny FernandezExecutive Summary set l2forward is one of those FortiGate interface options that looks harmless, rarely shows up in the GUI,...
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RFC 1918 Private Address Space: The Practitioner’s Guide
Manny FernandezEvery network engineer has typed 192.168.1.1 into a browser, and almost nobody has read the short document that makes that...
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SED and AWK for FortiGate Configs: Surgical Edits, Inventories, and Migrations from the Shell
Manny FernandezRead, audit, rewrite, and generate FortiOS configuration with two tools you already have. Executive Summary Objective: Use two tools that...
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Reading a Packet Capture to Troubleshoot Slow Application Performance
Manny FernandezExecutive Summary Objective: Turn "the app is slow" into a measured answer. Every slow transaction breaks down into network delay...
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HopMatrix: A great little tool packed with features
Manny FernandezExecutive Summary Objective: Get HopMatrix installed, verified, and working across all eight of its modes, then fold it into a...
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diagnose firewall iprope: Reading the FortiGate Policy Engine From the Kernel Up
Manny FernandezWhat the kernel actually enforces, how to read it, and the troubleshooting workflows that make it worth knowing Executive Summary...
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FortiGate Cloud SD-WAN Overlay: Hub-and-Spoke Orchestration Without a FortiManager
Manny FernandezBuild an ADVPN overlay across your branches from the FortiGate Cloud portal, with Fortinet-hosted hubs and transactional config push. Executive...
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Configuring RIP on FortiGate: Neighbors, Authentication, and Route Control
Manny FernandezExecutive Summary Objective: Stand up RIPv2 between two FortiGates, advertise their LANs, lock the adjacency down with MD5 authentication through...
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Hashing Files on macOS with Built-In Commands
Manny FernandezGenerate and verify MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512 hashes from Terminal using nothing but what ships on every Mac. Objective:...
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