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This is my personal space where I share insights, explore topics that fascinate me, and reflect on the lessons I’ve gathered over the years. I’m passionate and unapologetically opinionated, the views expressed here are entirely my own and don’t represent those of any organization I’m affiliated with.

Rails of Sheffiel - Steven Polley Hardstyle Remix

Vibestyler was one of my favorite artists from the Newgrounds audio portal back about 15 years ago. This is a tribute to their track titled “Rails of Sheffiel”, and my first time making hardstyle. Love from Canada. I left plenty of dynamic range, so be especially sure to give it lots of volume for a good time. MP3 Download ...

May 17, 2025 Â· 1 min Â· 129 words Â· Steven Polley

Fast Mental Subnetting

I find the human brain works well with /32’s, /24’s, /16’s and /8 network prefix sizes. Anyone with a basic understanding of subnetting can understand and feel why. They’re probably the first prefix sizes that people begin to build a basic mental model of, and therefore it can be useful when learning to subnet to work with these as if they are basic units. In the metric system, we use prefixes such as deca, hecto, kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, each a nice unit to work with for relative sizes. With computer storage, it’s much easier to say 639.54MB than 639540000 bytes. A similar intuition with relative sizes arises around each byte in a 32 bit mask for lengths of /8, /16, /24 and hosts /32. ...

March 22, 2025 Â· 2 min Â· 295 words Â· Steven Polley

Hide Your Ports - Authentication Before Connecting

Think about the services that only a few people need to access, but they need to be accessible from anywhere, over the internet. The internet is a giant untrusted monster network, full of evil people actively trying to harm you. If only a few people (let’s say in the ten-thousands) need to access your service, why do you make the service accessible to billions? It’s so asymmetrical. VPN Gateways VPN Gateways! They’re great! They sit on the edge of your network, and they let you access all your internal stuff! But if you want someone to be able to connect to your VPN over the internet, the VPN gateway itself must be publicly accessible. Yes, you likely have authentication on your gateway such as an IPSec Pre-Shared Key, and/or a username and password. But your gateway is still internet-facing, and let’s just say there are no guarantees for security. ...

July 21, 2024 Â· 4 min Â· 810 words Â· Steven Polley

RHCSA Exam Notes

A collection of my personal notes as I study for the RHCSA exam. I hope you find them useful as a reference. Notes available here: RHCSA EX200 Exam Preparation Notes

July 9, 2023 Â· 1 min Â· 30 words Â· Steven Polley

NXDOMAIN on DNS Server Startup

There is very peculiar behavior when a Windows DNS server is starting up. With the right request timing can result in a client with a poisoned DNS cache for that lasts for 1 hour (by default). That just seems crazy to me. To reproduce the issue, I loaded up a Windows DNS server with hundreds of zones and hundreds of records in each zone to simulate a reasonably large environment where loading the DNS database when the DNS server service starts actually takes a few seconds instead of near-instantly. ...

May 18, 2023 Â· 3 min Â· 596 words Â· Steven Polley

Dipole - Magnet Links for ruTorrent

Download your linux ISOs with style, using magnet links. Problem with rutorrent is that since it’s a web application, there is no URL handler application for adding torrents via magnet links. Using dipole, you now can! https://code.stevenpolley.net/steven/dipole I got bored today, so made this for a fun little project. Enjoy!

April 22, 2023 Â· 1 min Â· 50 words Â· Steven Polley

Real World Failure Is Not Ergodic

I always get a kick out of reading reliability statistics presented by hard drive manufacturers. They always post these crazy numbers for their reliability stats. Not to pick on Western Digital (they are my personal favorite), but take a look at what they report on these WD Gold drives. Up to 2.5 MILLION hours MTBF 2.5 million hours is over 285 years. Hard drives haven’t even been around that long, so how can they rightly claim the their product on average doesn’t fail for 285 years? It’s all in the details of how they make these measurements in the first place and a lack of accounting for wear and tear. ...

July 30, 2021 Â· 4 min Â· 781 words Â· Steven Polley

Serum - Drum & Bass

I recently bought Serum, which is a really sweet wavetable synthesizer made by xfer records, and I’ve been having an absolute blast with it. Give it a listen below, but do me a favor and turn up the volume. Video & Audio Your browser does not support embedding with the video tag. Fractal is a shader from zGameEditor modulated by the bass synth mixer track. Audio only Your browser does not support embedding with the audio tag. All of the synthesized sounds are Serum. It seems like there are so many controls and ways to edit the wave forms that this really is the end game for advanced synthesis and sound design. I’ve got to play around a bit more to clean things up, and I want to get more of an aggressive growl, but so far all my attempts have wound up sounding more robotic than natural. ...

June 20, 2021 Â· 2 min Â· 260 words Â· Steven Polley

Human Scheduling Is Insane

I’ve had the past 11 or so days free to work on some personal projects and had some ideas for a personal to-do list app I’d created and been slowly tinkering on and off for the past 2 years. Little did I know I would find out just how complicated it can be to decide what I should do next in my life. I’m not even talking about big life-changing events, but the little things done in life - the chores, the tasks, the toil. ...

April 6, 2021 Â· 7 min Â· 1394 words Â· Steven Polley

Security+

I decided I’ll go for the S0-501 Exam, and will share my notes here. You can find all of my notes here At the time of this post, my notes are ongoing, very incomplete and are updated as I go along. There may be spelling, grammar grammar or grammar errors? Some sections are empty as well, but will be filled in the coming weeks. Free notes I've taken about the Sy0-501 exam topics. I have not yet taken this exam. ...

December 17, 2020 Â· 1 min Â· 140 words Â· Steven Polley