It’s December 2012. Last year, I started my first days working as a network support engineer at my present job, so I no longer need to count my experience in months now.
Second: I achieved my CCNP certification on December 20th, 2011. A year can go fast – just two times more and I need to recertify if I don’t get anything equal or better by that time.
Third: the growth of my blog passed certain psychological borders: +30,000 total views, 100 blog posts (this is number 101) and I’m approaching (and at times surpassing) 1,000 visitors per week.

And what I’ve been doing lately? A brief review of what has been keeping me busy:

  • I had to test next-generation firewalls (NGFW) from different vendors and see what they are capable of. Personal achievement: all sales engineers have had sweat on their forehead from my questions. And not all products do what they advertise. I’m not sure if I can go into detail on that later, but I’ll try.
  • Research and design of an example MPLS network. Yes, I got to work with Cisco Metro Ethernet switches, and I’m going to post some articles about that later on.
  • My previous VPN articles: I have to admit, I wanted to post five, not four. The fifth article was going to be a site-to-site VPN on OpenBSD 5.2, but as much as I love that platform, I just can’t get it to work completely, and documentation is unclear. A shame really. If anyone has it working on a modern release (5.0 and up) and understands what (s)he is doing, you’re welcome to contact me.
  • Research into loop prevention, avoidance and limitation. Expect an upcoming article about that as well.

Thanks to all of you for reading my blog, and support in various forms (a comment, explanation, tips, links,…). Stay tuned!

Advertisement