About me

On https://yeehawitsjake.com, you'll find many of my projects, what I have built over the years, and the passion behind much of it.

But who am I you may ask?

Many call me Jake, although I could care less what you call me. I am an innovator, seeking improvements among the systems and products I use every day. I don't accept "this is just how we do things", I find new ways to improve the process. Will it work on the first try? Rarely, I am not that good. But I always find ways to improve. Innovating systems includes my own skills and abilities after all, right?

Let's dive in and I'll tell you all about me (No, this is not my Tinder bio).

At a young age, I was fascinated with computers. Anything electronic, really. I was always told to stop taking things apart but I never listened. I wanted to understand why something was happening. How could this toy flash these lights? How could these little speakers move? And since then, this same thought process has carried through my life. It's no longer just to understand why something is doing X, but if you understand the full process of what it should be doing, you get an understanding of why it may fail to do so in the future.

As time progressed, going into elementary and middle school, the tinkering would reach into software. At the age of 5-6, I was playing with those little Visual Basic Scripts to shut down a Windows-based computer. This was around the same time too I would stumble upon some of those Club Penguins legitimate hacks. The ones that required your Social Security number and all if you know what I mean.

Jokes aside, I probably committed every single violation that would be listed in a corporate computer handbook. From downloading random software to weakening the environment it runs in (i.e. disable settings to ask for administrator approval, change permissions among folders, etc), it was a good teaching lesson to know what not to do. All that software online telling you to just download more RAM or speed your computer up by downloading SuperCleanerXLProNew-NotAVirus.exe eventually sunk in with me - people lie online. They lie to gain hold of your machine, who you are, and other personal artifacts of your life. But how? How does this piece of software that I run go from downloading this "exe" file to someone in Jordan having full control of my computer?

Middle school is really where much of these sparks of inspiration and curiosity would flourish. When I had first started, I was introduced to the VEXtech robotic systems. Our class for these machines was pretty good, going into what to properly use to set up the metal structure of your device, how robots aren't just the factory arms you see but rather a concept - a tool in which to assist with a task. You don't need a motor to move around this metal arm, just a few pulleys and cranks. However, while much of our class was working on our first final - the traffic light system, I asked if I could do one of the more advanced finals for fun. This being the use of the remote control systems to build a 4 wheeled robot. A basic remote controlled car of sorts. If I recall correctly, it utilized the omni wheels as well to move from side to side.

We also had another class in which I began to realize my curiosity isn't limited to just small projects and getting extra credit - but it also could have gotten me suspended. As a part of our state requirements, we were required to take a basic computer literacy class. This included using Microsoft Paint, understanding keyboard shortcuts, QUERTY-based typing training, and more. In our middle school, we had about 5-10 minutes in between each class. And that was a mistake to give to me.

I jumped into our computer class room the first time, poking around after logging onto our central system. See, our school district ran off of Windows Active Directory, so we all had a set username and password to sign into any computer anywhere in the district. This also means that we had at least 1 or more Active Directory controllers that held two special scripts. It's been some time since I was messing with AD so I am not sure if these can be renamed or set in a special fashion, but we had "Logon.bat" and "Logoff.bat". The district had a script that would make sure you were not signed into any other system and if so, gave you a countdown to sign off the other machine.

I had just a couple minutes left and my earlier "training" from using Visual Basic scripts in my life trained me for this moment. I fired up Chrome, looked up the old "CD Drive prank script VBS", and copy/pasted it after editing the batch file. If I recall correctly, you can kinda use .cmd/.bat files and .vbs interchangeably. I may be wrong but I am pretty sure at a basic level you can. Regardless, the sound of hearing many CD drives popping in and out (including our teachers) while we all started signing in was a high I don't think I will ever reach again. From what I heard over the years, my script reached across the entire district to other schools as well. I was never called into the office for it, but I have always wondered if the IT staff in that district knew what happened. And for clarification - I should have never been able to edit those files in the first place. Had I known a bit more and felt evil, I probably could have taken out everyone's shared network drive (we all had a network mount where we could store our own files and see it on other machines, rather then save it to the PC itself). That I am sure would have been suspension, if not expulsion.

You could probably say that was my first introduction to the sphere of offensive and defensive tactics in the cyber sphere. While it was an unauthorized test, I see it more as an "unscheduled permissions update reminder". The real introduction, however, was to my high school cyberdefense program - CyberPatriot. Much of this program taught me not where to look - but rather the mindset and understanding of what I need to do to ensure the integrity and security of your standard system (or CISCO Network, if you did Packet Tracer).

While I was at high school for the full 4 years, I believe I only participated in 3/4 years of this program given my senior year I had taken Running Start - the college in high school course program. Being full time at a local college would give me more credits but no ability for the CyPat program. We reached semi-finals the 2/3 times and much of our training laid a pretty good path for not only understanding and concreting some of my Windows Server knowledge I had at the time, but it also introduced me to Linux/Ubuntu and understanding not only how to defend this instance, but common configuration paths (and really just how much easier Linux is for configuration, but that's just a skill issue).

While Packet Tracer taught well, the basic principals and understanding of networking can't be blitzed the same way that understanding common vulnerability points of a Windows or Linux system can. Perhaps this is one of my weaknesses, but I can tell you almost exactly how to configure and setup an NFS or Samba share or setup UFW - but you ask me a question about why X can only be configured this way for a Cisco Catalyst switch or Cisco 2901 router, I couldn't tell you. It's not that I do or don't remember it - but moreso I don't understand why. Is it a memory limit? Is there a software bug for this value being this high?

Now don't think I won't find the answer either. If I am confronted with a task in which I don't know the answer or a possible solution, I'll go hunting for it. I'll test it where possible, monitor performance, and see to it that I can tackle this solution. I don't rest easy at night if I can't get the issue resolved, it will linger and I will try and think about any possible way around it. Is there a workaround? Is it a software bug? Do we downgrade? Is there a hidden parameter to set when the software runs? Is there an underlying problem at the hardware level? An undocumented behavior?

Let me give you a real world problem and solution for it as well: My PowerVault MD1220. It holds 24 2.5 inch drives, two power supplies, and two backplanes. When it was given to me, there was two backplanes with two mini SAS cables to connect to the LSI RAID card. At some point, I noticed that when the array was under load or performing some sort of long term operations, disks would throw alarms at random. "SMART reported a drive failure", "SMART reported pre-conditions that could lead to future issues", "/dev/sdab cannot be accessed: Input/output error". You might think "maybe there's a lot of bad drives left in the array" just as anyone would right? But if you change around the disks or reboot and try again, you'll notice the errors to that disk go away and some other random disk starts throwing errors. It wasn't linked to the drive itself or even the slot, but rather the backplanes were having some sort of issue internally while also not throwing errors themselves. This was only discovered after replacing the backplanes and seeing that all those same disks reporting errors beforehand were now magically okay. Did it take me a few months to find this issue? Yeah, absolutely. Did I finally discover the answer? Yessir.

Now wrapping this all back up, I've taken much of these thought processes and experience with me through life. I've used them to understand where to look for the underlying cause to a problem. I've also remembered "hey, we had this issue before, let's apply the same solution and monitor behavior". The same passion and abilities have come with me throughout my life to bring me better skills and knowledge. From learning Docker in high school to transferring some of that knowledge to understanding Kubernetes, I do what I can to not only get the job done, but see to it that the solution sticks and improves the overall process.

Through my site, I am sure you'll see much of this. I may provide some of my guides here, some of my knowledge, and other items that have helped me. And if I am wrong - then so be it. Don't be afraid to correct me - in fact please do. I'd much rather deliver the most up to date information to someone and resolve their issue rather then leave them stuck on an issue that could cause even more issues.