Project Showcase

One of the small cities we support has a rugged laptop in each police vehicle, connected through an in-car cellular router. The router brings up a tunnel back to the city network so officers can reach dispatch, records systems and file shares from the car. The tunnel was up, and pinging internal servers by IP worked. Even so, the laptops couldn't resolve anything in the city's internal Active Directory domain. Group Policy failed, domain authentication fell back to cached credentials, and any application that referred to a server by name broke. Officers had been working around it for a while, and every fix tried so far had been on the laptops themselves, like hosts files,…

We wanted somewhere to share what we learn on the job. That means how-tos, project write-ups, and the gotchas that cost us an afternoon, so hopefully they don't cost you one. A static blog felt too one-way, and a chat server buries everything within a week. We wanted a proper forum with search, tags and accounts, which led us to Invision Community. It had to run on our own infrastructure, be easy to rebuild, look like ours, and be backed up properly. What it runs onA Debian 13 LXC container on our Proxmox cluster. It's one service per container, same as everything else we host.nginx and PHP 8.4 (PHP-FPM) from the Debian packages.MySQL 8.4 running in Docker inside the cont…

One of our municipal clients had a remote-access VPN appliance that, as far as anyone could remember, had never worked properly. Staff in the VPN group would connect and get a portal page with a single remote-desktop link. If they launched the full VPN client instead, it connected and then dropped within about a second. Over the years people had just learned to use the remote-desktop link and live without mapped drives, internal web apps and anything else that needed a real tunnel. When we asked about it, the answer was basically "oh, the VPN's always been like that." On paper the design was fine. Domain laptops with a valid machine certificate get a full network tunnel, …

Like a lot of small MSPs, our hosting grew one server at a time. We had a VPS for the ticketing system, another for the monitoring stack, and one for the RMM because it wanted its own box. The SIEM got another because it wanted a lot of RAM, a couple more ran WordPress sites and small internal apps, and the documentation wiki and password manager got squeezed in wherever there was room. Each decision made sense at the time. Together they came to about $334 a month across two providers, with backups, patching and firewall rules done slightly differently on every box. Whenever something broke, the first question was always "which server is that one on again?" We also had re…