How Rainier IT built Orting News: hourly polling of public sources, council meetings transcribed with Whisper on our own GPU, AI summaries with guardrails, and a person approving every story.
Shop Orting: How We Built a Free Directory for Every Business in Our Hometown
How Rainier IT built Shop Orting, a free directory, map and events calendar for every business in Orting, WA, on a hand-coded WordPress theme.
Security, à la carte: enterprise-grade protection for small business — one line item at a time
Our full managed-security stack — Huntress EDR, Managed ITDR for Microsoft 365, Action1 patching, and remote monitoring — sold per device, per month, with no bundles and no contracts. What each product does, what it costs, and how to build a stack.
Inside Percival: 28 MCP Servers, 213 Tools, and 7 Workers Powering Our In-House AI Operator
A deep technical tour of Percival, our self-hosted AI operator — 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.
Lock Down Windows 11 in 15 Minutes: A Hardening Checklist
A 15-minute, license-free Windows 11 hardening checklist for SMB endpoints — 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 — 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 — 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 — and why this combination turns an LLM from helpful-looking autocomplete into a junior engineer who has read the handbook.
Introducing the Rainier IT Client Knowledge Base
Introducing our new customer knowledge base—self-service guides, troubleshooting, and best practices available 24/7 at kb.rainier-it.com.