RTA Update September 2016

The past nine months have been immensely busy for me, thus the reason for the lack of updates to my blog. In January, I started my Senior Project Class at DeVry. The project was exceedingly helpful in putting the skills I learned at DeVry and throughout my career to the test. The project consisted of real world examples where students were teamed up to work as a Consulting firm for a large company. The firm was contracted to review, design, and create a request for proposal for the company.

During the duration of the class, I was assigned the Team Leader/ Project Manager. I was tasked in ensuring all team members contributed to the project and ensured there was adequate communication. In addition to the communication, I made sure that we had a proper file keeping and data retention policy in place to ensure all “legal” requirements were met. The team and myself choose a hierarchical, three layer network design with built in redundancy. The network employed mature technology and networking standards within the project scope, budget and time frame.

Needless to say, we passed the class with flying colors. The final grade for the project was a 90. My final GPA for my Bachelor’s Degree in Network Engineering and Communication Management was 3.86. I graduate with Magna Cum Laude. I missed Summa Cum Laude by 0.04 points in my GPA. However, I have done something truly remarkable and graduating with great distinction is a great achievement, and I am proud of myself.

I have put in a great deal of time, hard work, and personal sacrifices to achieve this goal and it was well worth it.  After, I finished my final class in February, I started working on my other goals for the year. Those goals included, studying for the CCNP Switch Exam, look for Network Engineering positions within TWC, and take some much needed time off from the past 3 years of blood, sweat and tears.

Right now, I am in the process of studying back for the CCNP Switch exam. I took it twice already and failed each time slowly improving upon my last grades. I totally underestimated the depth of information required for the CCNP Switch exam. Needless to say I thought I was prepared for it but I wasn’t. I spent the past several months studying and I will be retaking the exam in October.

Outside of the CCNP practice, I have taken several additional training classes through the SCTE. I have taken the class in understanding MPEG technologies and the Certified Wireless Technology Specialist (certification) class.  Each class I have taken, I have passed them with 90’s and those classes will help me with my current daily jobs within the ADSS team within Tier 3 support.

My next set of classes I am taking the is the CCNP T-shoot class and the Linux Professional Institute – Linux Essentials class. I feel those classes will help me further my understanding of the technology and help me advance my career, which is something I am actively working on as I am looking in becoming a network engineer.

Within the past 6 months, I worked on migrating multiple websites from one server to a new server. This was due to many problems I was experiencing with the old server and its management software. I migrated at least 8 sites to a new Linux Server with a new control panel and it was an arduous process as I hit many stumbling points along the way.  My current status is that I am currently running all my sites and services on a secondary server to baseline the new system before I rebuild the old server mirroring the new server and migrate the sites back.

Other than the server migration, I am also working on installing a Camera based security system within my house. I have purchased 7 wireless cameras and installed an open source Network Video Recording software on a Virtual Machine. The software is running and I am still working on installing all the camera in the final locations. Once finished I can then tweak the recording parameters so that the motion detection recording feature has less false positives.

All in all, I think my year was exceedingly busy. With graduating, studying, working, and doing personal and professional projects, it left little room for relaxation and fun. At this time, I plan on doing so this weekend before I prep to do some much needed house and garage cleaning before the winter hits. At this time, I will be going. Good day