What I read, what I retain

The article that guided my log centralisation stack migration. Promtail officially reached EOL in March 2026 — I applied the migration across my 10 LXC containers and 2 Proxmox hypervisors. Alloy's River pipeline configuration is more verbose than Promtail but far more flexible when it comes to journald label handling.

Came across this at exactly the right time, during my ACL deployment phase on the Cisco 3560-CX. The section on native VLAN and 802.1Q double-tagging VLAN hopping led me to review my trunk configuration — I had left the native VLAN at its default value, which is a known security weakness.

Directly relevant to my Windows Server 2022 Core AD deployment. I didn't implement the full tier model in the homelab (too many VMs involved), but I applied the core principle of not exposing the DC on the SERVERS network — it stays in the MGMT VLAN with restricted access, exactly as recommended.

I currently use SNMP v2c on my Cisco 3560-CX and pfSense with a non-trivial community string and source IP whitelisting. This article made the case clearly enough to convince me to migrate to SNMP v3 for encrypted polling — it's on my roadmap for next quarter.