2015 a brand new year

Happy New Year Everyone,

It has been quite some time since my last post here on my blog. The last time I posted anything was back in August of 2014. That was approximately 6 months ago. Many things have gone on since then. I was very busy. Between work and school, I did not have that much time to post anything. Now that the New Year has passed, I will try to do my best to update this blog regularly.

In current news, I am 6 weeks into the January session in school. I am taking classes for Linux Administration and VoIP administration. Both classes are going well for me. I am carrying an “A” in each class. Last year I maintained a 3.75 GPA and I am consistently passing my classes. I figure that I should be graduating within the next 12-16 months at most. I still have the rest of my networking classes and Senior Project. It looks like I still have much work to do, but I know that it will pay off in the end.

Other than working hard towards my Bachelor’s degree, I have started studying for the Juniper JNCIA certification. I am looking to diversify my networking skills. I have my CCNA so I figured that studying the Juniper JunOS system would be valuable set of skills to have as Cisco and Juniper are the largest Networking Vendors on the market.

The Juniper studying has been going quite well. I have ordered 2 used J-Series routers. The routers I picked up were the J-2350 and J-2320. Each router has a T1 Card with multiple ports. I also picked up a Cisco 1811 Wireless and a Cisco 1811-wired router. The 1811-Wired router has a Wic-1T-CSU-DSU.

My plans are to create a series of lab’s centered to get the two vendor’s systems working together. Interoperability is a good starting point. I figure I will be working with RIPv2 and OSPF. This will also give me the ability to work with Route Redistribution between the two routing protocols.

When I create the lab topologies, I will post them with the updates on how they when, what challenges I experienced, etc. I feel that this would be a good learning opportunity and learning these systems and being proficient will make my Network Engineering skills better.

With the addition of schoolwork and regular work, I was in a 3 month long process of migrating all the websites I host from a shared hosting environment to a VPS server that I administer myself.  The process was not that bad. I did have some challenges but nothing too bad to fix. I still have some minor things I need to work out such as my email server with DKIM encryption to help stop emails originating from emails that are sent validly through my server being immediately sent to the spam folder of other email providers.

Overall, I have been busy these past six months and I do not foresee it slowing down. As they say, “Idle hands are Satan’s play things.” It helps keep me out of trouble and it helps me improve myself, which is a good thing. For now, I think I should get going, I have many things planned to do. Have a great day.