Logins, SIDs, and Kerberos from First Principles, Part 7: Is Your Kerberos Still Using RC4?
got your connections onto Kerberos. This part asks an uncomfortable follow-up: encrypted with what? You probably have not thought about Kerberos encryption types recently. That is fair; the protocol mostly just works and has for…
Logins, SIDs, and Kerberos from First Principles, Part 6: SPNs and the Silent NTLM Fallback
The first five parts of this series were about who you are: SIDs, logins, groups. This one is about how you prove it. When a Windows principal connects to SQL Server with integrated authentication, one…
Logins, SIDs, and Kerberos from First Principles, Part 2: The Vanishing Service Account
Years ago at a previous employer, I wrote a fleet-sweep script that searched every SQL Server instance in the estate for a specific service account, by name and by a known-bad SID. I no longer…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 11: The Keys Nobody Backs Up – SMK, DMK, and a War Story
ended the series with a rule: key material is a third artifact class beside data backups and log backups, and it needs its own backup. That post demonstrated the certificate side. This bonus part climbs…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 8: Verification – Your Backup Job Succeeding Proves Almost Nothing
ended on an uncomfortable question: the “clean” full backup I used to repair a corrupted page – how did I know it was clean? This part demonstrates, with a deliberately corrupted database, exactly how little…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 7: Page-Level Restore – Fixing 8 KB Instead of 8 TB
Storage corrupted one 8 KB page in a large table. One option: restore the entire database from backup, losing hours to I/O. The better option, when the damage is small and isolated: restore just that…