A deep technical tour of Percival, our self-hosted AI operator ā 28 MCP servers (213 tools) wired to every system at Rainier IT, 7 autonomous background workers, Claude Haiku over a LiteLLM proxy with Ollama fallback on a GPU LXC, pgvector memory, prompt caching, three-tier approval gates, and WebSocket streaming.
Author: Christopher
Grew up in the Midwest, moved out West and always looking East. I wonder what it would feel like to be in the event horizon of a black hole. If a line goes straight all the way to infinity does it circle back on itself?
Lock Down Windows 11 in 15 Minutes: A Hardening Checklist
A 15-minute, license-free Windows 11 hardening checklist for SMB endpoints ā TPM/Secure Boot, BitLocker, standard-user accounts, Defender + ASR rules, firewall, telemetry trim, and Recall opt-out.
Why Your SMB Needs Windows 11 Pro, Not Home: The $99 Upgrade That Saves $4,000 in Incidents
Windows 11 Home is the wrong product to run a business on. Real BitLocker, Group Policy, Entra/AD join, RDP host, Hyper-V, MDM, and Update for Business are all Pro-only ā and the upgrade is $99 with no reinstall.
Lock Down SSH in 10 Minutes: A Hardening Checklist for Linux
Key-only auth, no root, a non-default port, fail2ban, and a workflow that won’t lock you out ā every box I run gets this same six-line hardening file.
Make Your Servers Smile: Dynamic MOTDs with Figlet, Cowsay, Fortune, and Lolcat
A tour of /etc/update-motd.d/, the four tiny packages that build a great login banner (figlet, cowsay, fortune, lolcat), and how to drop a unicorn into your SSH greeting in under ten minutes.
Claude Code + the Karpathy Guidelines: A Saner AI Coding Workflow
How I install Anthropic’s Claude Code CLI plus the Superpowers and Karpathy-guidelines plugins from the marketplace ā and why this combination turns an LLM from helpful-looking autocomplete into a junior engineer who has read the handbook.
Onboarding Day, Reinvented: How a New Client Gets Fully Protected Before Lunch
When you sign with Rainier IT, every device you own is provisioned, monitored, and backed up the same day ā not three weeks later. Here’s exactly what runs, and why it matters for security.
ā Saturday Morning Coffee & IT Tips ā
Happy Saturday, South Pierce County! šļø Quick question: When was the last time you tested your backup? Iām serious. When was the last time you […]
Dockerize all the things!
Introduction to Docker: Ship Your Code, Not Your Headaches ‘Ever heard a developer say, “But it worked on my machine!”? That phrase highlights one of […]
Creating Percival, our AI Staff Writer
So we are hiring a new staff writer named Percival, and when I say we have to train this guy, I mean we really have […]