Security, observability, and AI in engineering workflows, written by an SRE who has run production for 20+ years.https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/remote-desktop-lessons-hidden-cursors-black-frames-headless-windows/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/remote-desktop-lessons-hidden-cursors-black-frames-headless-windows/I shipped four small remote-desktop features this week: view-only by default, a draggable session banner, showing the end user's mouse, and real multi-monitor support. The features were the easy part. These are the notes I want to remember from making them work.Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/two-years-of-building-a-security-platform-solo-with-ai-agents/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/two-years-of-building-a-security-platform-solo-with-ai-agents/One SRE, two regions, one security platform in production. What the architecture looks like, what the AI agents did, where they burned me, and what I would not do again.Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/change-windows-for-machines/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/change-windows-for-machines/We gave the deploy pipeline the same deal a human operator gets: file a change, get a window, do the work, get locked out again. This week a build rode the whole loop with zero human touches.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/soc2-for-a-10-person-saas/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/soc2-for-a-10-person-saas/A customer asked for your SOC 2 report and you have no security team. Here is the order I would do things in, from someone who builds compliance tooling and runs production for a living.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/an-ai-agent-wedged-a-2gb-prod-host/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/an-ai-agent-wedged-a-2gb-prod-host/A monitoring agent is supposed to be the lightest thing on the box. Ours ate a small host alive - and the command path that could have fixed it remotely was broken in the same binary. A post-mortem.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/ebpf-security-events-from-fork-storm-to-signal/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/ebpf-security-events-from-fork-storm-to-signal/eBPF gives you every exec on a host, far more than anyone can read. How our agent DDoSed itself with docker inspect, why container healthchecks are the loudest thing on a server, and the filtering that turned a firehose into a signal.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/the-day-fail2ban-banned-the-ops-ip/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/the-day-fail2ban-banned-the-ops-ip/We shipped SSH auto-blocking and it promptly banned our own ops IP. A staging story about automation that locks you out, an unnecessary server reset, and designing auto-response you can survive.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/paired-pollers-and-the-double-execution-bug/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/paired-pollers-and-the-double-execution-bug/Redundant pollers mean an uptime check never silently skips. Then a legacy scheduler ran every check three times and I learned that duplicate execution is its own outage.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/hetzner-and-the-ram-price-spike/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/hetzner-and-the-ram-price-spike/DRAM is roughly 3x its pre-AI-boom price and it shows in every hosting invoice. Real lessons from running a two-region SaaS on Hetzner through the squeeze.Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/llm-tool-use-tenant-isolation/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/llm-tool-use-tenant-isolation/If the model picks the arguments, the model can pick the wrong tenant. How AlertKick's AI assistants query customer data with tenancy pinned server-side and a whitelist of what tools may touch.Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/the-bug-where-commands-silently-stopped-reaching-agents/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/the-bug-where-commands-silently-stopped-reaching-agents/A Kafka migration left one half of the pipe pointing at the old brokers. Nothing errored, nothing alerted - commands were published to one cluster and consumed from another. On testing message paths end to end.Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/multi-region-on-a-budget-eu-us-on-hetzner/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/multi-region-on-a-budget-eu-us-on-hetzner/Geo-routing with a Cloudflare Worker, agent token replication, certificate SANs and sticky sessions - the unglamorous plumbing of running two regions without cloud-provider magic.Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/kafka-in-kraft-mode-three-brokers-per-region-with-ansible/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/kafka-in-kraft-mode-three-brokers-per-region-with-ansible/Why we skipped managed Kafka, what a minimal HA KRaft deployment on Hetzner actually looks like, and the co-location trade that makes it nearly free.Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/one-install-script-six-linux-distros/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/one-install-script-six-linux-distros/curl | bash is the easy part. Init systems, package managers, ancient glibc, and every other thing a single install script must survive when it runs on hardware you have never seen.Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/exploring-ebpf-with-libbpf-and-ebpf-go-library/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/exploring-ebpf-with-libbpf-and-ebpf-go-library/Exploring eBPF with libbpf and ebpf go libraryThu, 26 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/managing-openshift-nodes-with-sync-pods-and-configmaps/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/managing-openshift-nodes-with-sync-pods-and-configmaps/Managing OpenShift Nodes with Sync Pods and ConfigMapsTue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/kubernetes-vs-openshift-understanding-the-differences-and-choosing-the-right-solution/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/kubernetes-vs-openshift-understanding-the-differences-and-choosing-the-right-solution/Kubernetes vs. OpenShift: Understanding the Differences and Choosing the Right Solution Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/vault-ha-mysql-backend-cannot-assign-requested-address/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/vault-ha-mysql-backend-cannot-assign-requested-address/Vault HA mysql backend cannot assign requested addressThu, 19 May 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/git-cherry-pick-examples/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/git-cherry-pick-examples/Git cherry pick examplesThu, 12 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/samsung-smart-tv/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/samsung-smart-tv/I started seeing samsung push ads to the main TV display bar. So, I decided to do something about. Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/start-with-empathy/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/start-with-empathy/About my observations and thoughts over number of years on what I have seen as interactions between engineering teams and development teams and faults there-in Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/starting-to-blog-again/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/starting-to-blog-again/Starting to Blog AgainSun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/cobertura-report-not-showing-css-properly/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/cobertura-report-not-showing-css-properly/Cobertura Report Not showing css properlySat, 17 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/rackspace-cloud-dns-management-and-api-usage/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/rackspace-cloud-dns-management-and-api-usage/Rackspace Cloud DNS management and API usageSat, 13 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/interactive-command-line-interface-to-rackspace-cloud-files/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/interactive-command-line-interface-to-rackspace-cloud-files/Interactive Command line Interface to Rackspace Cloud FilesWed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/rackspace-cloud-files-and-php/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/rackspace-cloud-files-and-php/Rackspace Cloud Files and phpThu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/recovering-deleted-files-from-linux-ext3-filesystem-on-cloud-servers/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/recovering-deleted-files-from-linux-ext3-filesystem-on-cloud-servers/Recovering deleted files from Linux ext3 filesystem on Cloud Servers.Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/cloud-servers-high-availability-with-heartbeat-on-linux-centos-5-5/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/cloud-servers-high-availability-with-heartbeat-on-linux-centos-5-5/Cloud Servers - High Availability with heartbeat on CentOS 5.5Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/mysql-master-master-replication-on-debian-5-lenny/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/mysql-master-master-replication-on-debian-5-lenny/MySQL master master replication on Debian 5 (Lenny)Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/installing-xenserver-using-usb-mboot-c32-not-a-com32r-image/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/installing-xenserver-using-usb-mboot-c32-not-a-com32r-image/Installing XenServer using usb - mboot.c32: not a COM32R imageFri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/mounting-cloud-files-using-cloudfuse-into-ubuntu-10-10-v2/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/mounting-cloud-files-using-cloudfuse-into-ubuntu-10-10-v2/Mounting Rackspace Cloud Files using cloudfuse into ubuntu 10.10 v2Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/installing-apache-mysql-and-php-on-fedora-14-on-rackspace-cloud-servers/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/installing-apache-mysql-and-php-on-fedora-14-on-rackspace-cloud-servers/Installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Fedora 14 on Rackspace cloud servers.Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/rackspace-cloud-servers-linux-rescue-mode/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/rackspace-cloud-servers-linux-rescue-mode/Rackspace cloud servers - linux rescue modeThu, 30 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/extract-pages-from-a-pdf-file-in-ubuntu-10.10/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/extract-pages-from-a-pdf-file-in-ubuntu-10.10/Extract pages from a PDF file in Ubuntu 10.10Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/java-runtime-env-on-fedora-14/https://www.sandeepsidhu.com/p/java-runtime-env-on-fedora-14/Java runtime environment on fedora 14Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT