Clockwork Notes

IPA: Using it for external DNS (the awkward way)

tucklesepk+blog@gmail.com (Louis Abel) — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:00:00 -0700

I’ve been in the process of redoing my IPA domain at home. I decided that I wanted a new domain while not changing ID’s, but also allowing me to control some DNS domains that are external in the process.

Traditionally, I have managed some domains with IPA while guaranteeing that some are available externally and that if my IPA servers were down during maintenance, bind on my AlmaLinux router would still serve DNS for my network. This worked for the most part, actually, though I only had that one name server that was known/usable. (You can imagine what happens when the one and only name server for a domain stops responding to requests.)

Opinions

tucklesepk+blog@gmail.com (Louis Abel) — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

This blog isn’t necessarily for opinions. However, I receive enough questions in my email about what I think about “this” or “that.” To make it easier, I have made this page to explain at some degree what I think about the various subject matter I’ve been asked about.

Mikrotik: A new adventure in the networking world

tucklesepk+blog@gmail.com (Louis Abel) — Sun, 19 May 2024 14:20:00 -0700

Recently, my HP ProCurve switch decided to die. It was one of those situations where it didn’t make sense to try to repair it. However, this caused my entire home network to go down, so I had to plug the things that I could directly into my Linux router/lab box instead. Now normally, I’d be able to get another ProCurve from my father, as he used to have access to pallets of them. However, this is no longer the case, so I had to figure out what I wanted to do instead.

Resume

tucklesepk+blog@gmail.com (Louis Abel) — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 17:25:35 -0700

Louis M. Abel

Phoenix, AZ

Objective

To acquire a position in your Information Technology Department as an Administrator, Engineer, or Architect

Technical Skills

Notable Achievements

Successful enterprise implementation for system access controls utilizing FreeIPA / Red Hat IdM with and without Active Directory trusts
Successful implementation, maintenance, and enforcement of the CIS Benchmarks to ensure systems and applications are hardened beyond PCI compliance across both Linux, UNIX, Windows platforms as well as Middleware
Successful enterprise implementation of both configuration and asset management via SaltStack, streamlining overall management of 4000+ on-prem and cloud Linux assets
Successful migrations via PowerShell from vRealize 6 to 7.6 for clients that did not perform in-place upgrades
Built and co-lead an open source team to create and release an Enterprise Linux distribution called “Rocky Linux” based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Stream
Built and maintained many ansible roles and playbooks to maintain the Rocky Linux infrastructure

Professional Experience

Open Source Contributions

RPM maintainer for the Red Hat based Linux distributions based on Fedora Packaging Guidelines
Maintain personal github repos for FreeIPA Identity Management, PCI compliance configurations for Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, Discord Python plugins, and RPM build specs
Collaborate and provide support for FreeIPA Identity Management and Fedora on mail list and IRC mediums
Infrastructure, Identity Management, and Release Engineering for Rocky Linux

Certifications

RHCE - Red Hat Certified Engineer - April 14, 2025 - 120-155-718
RHCSIM - Red Hat Certified Specialist in Identity Management - April 17, 2022 - 120-155-718

Welcome

tucklesepk+blog@gmail.com (Louis Abel) — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 17:17:36 -0700

More to come.