School has begun

School is in the air and once again I am walking the walkways of Murray State University.  Being a senior feels good and knowing that I will finally graduate in May makes this year look promising.  I am taking some great courses and one not so good course called COM 161, maybe you know it Public Speaking.  A much needed evil, however, not what I wanted to be taking my Senior year.  All my other classes are within my major and are very exciting.  The professors are very good this time, finally a higher level of thinking instead of a lower class of professor.  the courses that I am taking now allow me to do quite a bit of investigation and exploring of the labs. 

I have met several people insterested in the CCNA and will be studying for it this time and hopefully will have it taken by Dec.  Hopefully, classes and softball will go well.

One thing though about this year is all the guys I worked with who were old school, are gone.  I walked in on the first day and was depressed from not seeing all the old faces.  The younger guys are great don't get me wrong but there is nothing like sitting down and having some of the discussions about life, computers, and technology that we had back in the day.  The hay day of the place I work is over and that is a sad fact.  No longer can I learn from the people around me, I must venture out into new worlds.  Hell, that was pretty deep.

Moving, Working, Moving

Alright today at work, which by the way has been busy as hell.  Number one we just moved into a new building with a brand new infrastructure, that means from the ground up all new equipment.  A total gig backplane.  Now we have a DS3 connection which runs at 45 Mbps which is flipping fast.  we have around about 15M for data, 10 M Vpn, and the rest for voice and other resources.

We have a brand new phone system which is VoIP and TDM phones.  The biggest introduction however has been the two Pix firewalls.  Although I am not a Cisco guru or anything nor have I ever worked on a Cisco Pix firewall before but I did get a pretty good look at the config files that were used and it seems pretty easy as far as commands.

I couldn't believe the time it took to put all the equipment in the server room.  patching things down, racking servers, plugging switches in and making sure they were in the right VLANs, Looking at the DMZ, hooking up Fiber Cons on the switch, router, and firewall interfaces.  It was a interns dream to be apart of one of the companines biggest moves.

And although it went smoothely there were still some problems that arose as far as routes in the firewall and router that weren't quite right.  VPN tunnels not being set up.  Weird things like a VoIP phone being plugged into two wall jacks causing a loop whne patched in and causing the phone system to crash.  

All in all it was one hell of a weekend.  I finally go to spend a whole 24 hour shift moving and configuring it was cool to be needed by the other tech guys for questions.  It was a great feeling being the only guy that had worked with linux and being able to work (while being monitored very closley) on the IDS.

I had one hell of a weekend at work and this week we will be getting back to normal.

Update

I have been trying to update my blog on more of a regular basis but alas it is hard to do when you are always doing something.  So today on a nice Saturday afternoon and after I have done my duty of cleaning out my truck, weed eating the grass, and swam for a small portion of the day its time to sit back and enjoy the blogging.

As I sit here and enjoy a Rolling Rock, it occurs to me that most of my IT friends at this point are over in KC or thinking about KC.  Either that or they have jobs in pretty nice places.  I think about this because I am still an Intern with one more year of school left and everyone i have talked to about Network Administration or System Administration or Security positions have said it takes a while.  Well, I want to be a Network Administrator or Security Administrator whenever I get done with school.  Here is my brief roadmap to make this happen. 

1. Take Security+ test (since this is a Comptia test it will stay with me and it is basically just knowledge from a book not real world experience necessary.
2. Take CCNA while in college and use the lab as my study arena.
3. Begin taking microsoft certifications because most places like to have MCSA and MCSE in the house
4. After taking Sec+, work on other certifications like Lin+, Net+ just to have them.

So there is what I need to achieve in order to get to what i want to be and oh yeah i have to be able to give detailed answers on every technology they ask about without blinking an eye.  I hope to be a Badass at networks and security.  Until then I am a Badass in training. 

Elizabethtown sadness

Wake up in the morning around 11:30 because I had worked the night before moving 70 people into a new building when you hear a blood curdiling scream from next door.  This is how Saturday rolled me out of bed my neighbor screaming.  I am pretty close to the neighbor and their family when my cousin finally told me what was going on I knew that the rest of the week was going to be rough for them.

The news that made the neighbor scream was her step son had killed himself.  What a way to start your Saturday.  All this weekend its been nothing but trying to to just see what they need and kinda stay out of the way and let the family come in and begin to mend and talk about the life that was lost.

Yeah its a little deep but its what went down this weekend.  Its hard to know what to do for a family in that situation.  I have alot of empathy for them.

One Phone Call

Today I have discovered that one phone call can change the entire weekend and possibly your entire life.  As we were having dinner (my neighbors, my cousin, nad her husband) and enjoying some beer and interesting conversation a phone call came in on my cousin's husband's cell phone.  You know a phone call is not a good one when he says, "How bad is it?", Where are they taking her?, do you need anything?.  Those are not the question of a positive phone call.  When the phone went down we discovered that his grandmother had blood on the brain and that they were going to operate tomorrow.  Of course he loaded up in the truck and went home.  It is amazing one phone call.  I fail to mention that loading up the truck meant the kids and luggage and making several phone calls to family members and making arrangements for the kids with the other grandparents.  Needless to say its a hard pill to swallow.

The neighbors this morning at around 3 AM got a disturbing call from a boys mother who was in a four wheeler accident.  The kid was only 15 or 16 years old and he wrecked and in intensive care.  This one phone call canceled all plans and made the daughter who was the boys friend devastated.  Even worse was when another phone call came to say they were pulling the plug because he was brain dead.  The girl devastated went to the memorial ceremony tonight and will probably never be the same.  i fail to mention the tears but also the girl lost another friend a few years ago and that is a pretty tough pill to swollow when your 16.

Last Septmember I got on of those type of calls.  My grandpa was in the hospital for blood on the brain and it was a stroke I remember dropping everything and rushing to his side.  Scared to death it would be the last time.  I hate those phone calls when you know its serious.  Have you ever had a phone call you knew just wasn't going to be good?

Life comes fast.  Realization of the night.

Blurry Weekends

So I am officially 21 thats right 21, and lets just say that the first weekend was a littler blurry.  I went to my first liquor store and bought a 12 pack of Amberbock (great beer), Killian's irish Red, and makers Mark.  Later on some guys from work came over to the house and we played some poker.  Here is where begins to get a bit blurry.  By the time they all came over and we got started playing i had alreayd had 3 beers this was 7:00 pm then around 8:00 i had 5 my head was a little dizzy.  As i moved on i decided to try Makers Mark this was a bad choice.  Needless to say I don't remember a whole lot after I had the whiskey I went back to beer another two I think.  I think I said some stuff and did some wiered crap but the typical thing when your are drunk.  One problem i had to be at work at 11:00 and then I had to stay till around about 3:00 in the morning.  i got sick that night and was puking all night and then that next moring.  It was a struggle to get up but i did and that was a mistake as well. 

moral of story don't get platered when your a weak drunk.

Downer

Ok, so I am in Elizabethtown now and working at my summer job again.  I love the people, i love the atmosphere, but there is one issues that will never escape me.  Its called limited permissions and here is my case.  I have been at the company for 3 summers now and have proven myself every year.  Yet, it seems that every year I return I have fewere and fewer persmissions to work with.  I do realize i am part time, I am just an intern, and everytime I return there are new bosses with new policies and new ways of doing things.  I get that, I don't get not giving someone enough permission enough rights to do his or her job. 

Think about this today someone sent a work order to see who had a particular file open on the server because they needed to some work on it and it was locked.  This is a very simple task of connecting to the file and print server's compmgmt.msc console and going to System Tools>Shared folders> Open Files, this is a very easy task.  There is one problem though you have to have pretty substantial rights to access this, however,  I know you can give a group rights to certain objects and not allow access to others.  This would be nice.  Instead of putting in red tap everywhere and making work orders wait in the Database for several days until the guy with the rights comes in and you can talk to him.  Its stupid why create this black hole, I am not asking for the rights to grant permissions to add Security Groups in AD or change the Global policy.  I just want enough rights to do my job, to handle tickets, hell to learn.  I think is a saying about putting a goldfish in a small tank, it says he won't grow he might even shrink, if you put the goldfish into a large tank he'll grow to be really big.  I think this is kinda what is going on, I mean think about it I am in a small permission set and it feels like my brain just turns itself off cause I know I can not do anything about certain tickets so I don't even  attempt to troubleshoot (half the time I don't have the rights to troubleshoot properly). 

I just think that before glorified Senior Admins, Top Mangement, decide to restrict Junior admins, technicians, they should think about how much time they are wasting by throwing in so much red tape.  I know it is a requirement but think it through, be smarter.  Eventurally workers will like the fact that you care.