Why RLC Pro? Enterprise Linux Built on Rocky

I wrote this piece for CIQ making the case for RLC Pro, what it is, who it serves, and why the foundation it is built on matters before you get to any of the enterprise features.

The post starts with Rocky Linux and why binary compatibility with Enterprise Linux is not a marketing claim but an operational one. Certified workloads run as certified. ISV support applies without exceptions. Compliance frameworks transfer directly. That is the floor RLC Pro is built on, and it is worth understanding before layering anything else on top.

What RLC Pro adds is the support model, LTS coverage, and compliance posture that production environments actually require. FIPS 140-3 certifications ship with LTS versions .2, .6, and .10. GPU drivers for NVIDIA and AMD come pre-installed. Security maintenance runs through May 2032 with committed CVE response timelines.

The part of this post I am most proud of is the support section. In May 2026, three critical local privilege escalation vulnerabilities arrived within three weeks. Copy Fail, Dirty Frag, and Fragnesia. CIQ delivered Knowledge Base guidance to customers the same day each one was disclosed, patched kernels reached production ahead of other distributions, and federal customers with specific dependencies got configuration guidance built around their actual environments. I got to write that story because it actually happened, and that kind of outcome is worth documenting.

Read the full post on CIQ: Why RLC Pro

Writing a “why buy” post is only as good as the evidence behind it. This one had real evidence.

Home Lab in 2026: Is It Still Worth It? | The IT Guy Show Episode 023

Josh from Keep It Techie joins me for a conversation about home lab ownership in 2026, what it actually costs, what it gets you, and when it stops making sense.

This one started as a personal question I have been sitting with for a while. I have a Dell PowerEdge R720 sitting in a colocated data center in Kansas City. It is old, loud, power-hungry, and costs me $70 a month in colo fees. I have 3 gigabit Google Fiber at the apartment. At some point the math stops working in favor of the colo, and this episode is me thinking out loud about that trade-off with someone who has been through it.

Josh makes the case that home labs are still worth it in 2026, but the calculus has changed. Raspberry Pis and compact prosumer hardware have lowered the entry point considerably, but electricity and heat are real costs that blade server enthusiasts tend to underestimate until the AC bill arrives. We talked through his recommendation for the 45 Drives HL8 as a quiet, apartment-friendly storage solution, the Cloudflare tunnel approach for self-hosting without exposing ports, and the perpetual networking rabbit hole that neither of us has fully escaped.

There is also a longer thread in here about career advice, getting started in IT, and why not everyone needs to chase cybersecurity just because it is trending.

Josh’s channel is also quietly helping me prep for my Linux+ exam, which he did not know until I mentioned it on air. Worth subscribing to if you are building out your home lab or your Linux skills.

What Is RLC+? Rocky Linux with GPU Drivers Built In

I wrote this explainer for CIQ introducing RLC+, the free, GPU-ready tier that sits between community Rocky Linux and the full RLC Pro subscription.

The post is built around a simple observation: Rocky Linux is a great starting point, but at some point your infrastructure asks more of the OS than a baseline install can deliver. GPU workloads need drivers. AI and machine learning pipelines need more than CPU mode to run efficiently. And when something breaks at 2am, the forum is not a satisfying answer.

The core differentiator for RLC+ is preinstalled GPU drivers for both Nvidia and AMD hardware, including the CUDA toolkit and DOCA-OFED for Nvidia, and ROCm for AMD. Installing GPU drivers manually is a chore most people have done exactly once and never want to do again. RLC+ skips that entirely. The post includes a real-world performance benchmark worth noting: according to Andrew Lewman, co-founder of the Tor Project, Ollama runs 7 to 20 times faster in GPU mode versus CPU mode. For anyone running a local AI server on their LAN, that difference is the ballgame.

RLC+ is free, binary-compatible with Enterprise Linux, and available as ISOs, KVM images, cloud images for AWS, Azure, and GCP, container images, and bootc images.

Read the full post on CIQ: Why RLC+

This kind of tiered product explainer is a good test of whether you actually understand the product well enough to explain who it is for and why the upgrade is worth it without making it sound like a sales pitch.

AI and the Human in the Loop: What Actually Gets Replaced | IT Guy Show Ep. 022

Episode 22 of The IT Guy Show is a milestone for me, and not just because the number is round. Karl Abbott was my very first guest back on episode one, and he came back for what turned into one of the best conversations I have had on the show.

Karl is a product manager at Microsoft working on Linux vendor partnerships, a university regent, and the host of his own podcast on the human side of product management. He wrote a LinkedIn post called “AI Didn’t Replace My Work” that caught my attention and kicked off this whole episode. The short version of his argument: AI removes the mechanical friction, but it does not carry the consequence. Judgment, taste, and responsibility stay human. When the execution gets cheap, the quality of your thinking becomes the actual work.

We got into vibe coding, what it actually demands from engineers versus what people assume it removes, and why bad assumptions fed into an AI system come out looking clean and confident on the other side. We also talked about higher education, where Karl made a point that stuck with me: if students are not building judgment through struggle and repetition, schools need to be very intentional about where that formation is going to come from. I shared some of my own experience teaching Linux administration at JCCC and why I tell my students that using AI to fill out a lab is cheating themselves, not just the system.

There is also a good stretch near the end on book recommendations, including a few I had not heard of that I am now actively tracking down.

Watch the full episode on The IT Guy Show: A Human in the Middle | Episode 022

This one fits squarely in the middle of what I think about most: how people who work in technical fields stay sharp and relevant as the tools keep changing underneath them.

Why Rocky Linux? Enterprise Linux Built to Last

I wrote this piece for CIQ as a foundational explainer on Rocky Linux, covering where it came from, who is running it, and why the governance structure matters as much as the technology.

The origin story is worth knowing. When IBM acquired Red Hat and CentOS was effectively discontinued as a stable downstream rebuild, Gregory Kurtzer, one of CentOS’s original co-founders, announced a replacement the same day. Rocky Linux was named after his late co-founder Rocky McGaugh, who never got to see what CentOS had become. Within days it was the top-trending repository on GitHub. The community response was immediate and unmistakable.

The post covers what makes Rocky Linux a legitimate enterprise choice beyond just being free: binary compatibility with the Enterprise Linux standard, a governance model specifically designed to prevent what happened to CentOS, and a decade-long support lifecycle that lets infrastructure teams plan without building in forced migrations. It also gets into who is actually running it, not home lab hobbyists, but AWS, Google Cloud, Rakuten Symphony, and Equinix, organizations making serious at-scale infrastructure decisions.

Read the full post on CIQ: Why Rocky Linux? Enterprise Linux Built to Last

Writing foundational content like this is something I enjoy because getting the history and the governance right matters as much as the technical specs, especially for an audience evaluating a long-term infrastructure commitment.