2016 Year In Review ~ Firewall Ninja

With this post, I'm looking to start a new tradition with my studies, and by extension, with the blog. I'm going to recap 2016. Where I've been, what I've done, and where I hope to go from here. This post is entirely for me, anyone else will probably not find it very useful unless they're stalking me. But feel free to stalk if you wish, I don't mind.

I started out the year with a post called New Year, New Focus, where I laid out my intentions on where the blog was heading this year. i did a pretty good job of staying on target for the most part. Study and certification wise, wanted to say on target with the CCNP Security, which I did by finally passing the 300-206 SENSS exam. I also intended to give thought to the MCSA 2016 which I plan to tackle soon, and the CISSP, which is the capstone of my Masters Degree program.

For the blog, I finally bit the bullet and bought my first domain after a bit of back and forth on what I wanted. I also started paying more attention to the aesthetics of the blog, and moved away from the default themes, and finally commissioned a logo. This blog started out as simply somewhere to stash my list of free CCNA related resources, but I set a goal to start posting more to help with my studies. Mission accomplished there, I have more posts this year than the previous 5 years combined.

I didn't touch the MCSA at all. The closest I got was adding a couple VMs to the lab which run Server 2016. I barely even kicked the tires on it. So I'll get back on this after the CISSP.

Towards the CISSP however, I did accomplish a lot. In school I took a few classes directly related to the material (a class that was supposed to be related to intrusion detection that instead went through a Security+ level of material, a class on disaster recover/business continuity, and a class on enterprise incident response). Outside of the classroom, I continued reading.

Of course, the lab has continued to evolve and grow. I went into the year with a couple low power toys (AMD A4 CPUs) running Hyper-V. As the year went along, I built an ESXi server on a pair of quad-core Opterons, and continue to throw more hardware at it. It currently has 64GB of RAM, 2.5TB of storage, and 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The two Hyper-V hosts still exist, running a few VMs as well in addition to file server duties. Finally, there's an i5 half-top running as a domain controller and will probably host a few VMs itself if I ever get around to upping the 4GB of RAM in it. The network consists of a Cisco 2821 router, 3750 switch, 1130 access point, and a 2511 access server. Other than that, everything is currently virtualized.

Here's the rundown on all the current VMs, not counting the workstations and systems that were set up for short term testing that I haven't bothered to really keep track of.