Still Can’t Believe It’s Already May.

Steadily working towards a CCNP Security certification. There is so much material to cover and my memory is not what it once was. Many of the technologies and solutions explored in the Cisco Security Core material exist in our work environment but I rarely interact with them as a Data Center engineer. I decided to start using study aids to help retain and recall all the information from the books and videos. For note taking I settled on initial pen and paper, then transfer into Obsidian. Obsidian has a reputation of being an excellent study aid with features that allow for linking notes and concepts both logically and visually. Architecting a solution that keeps the notes synced on different devices along with keeping them backed up and secure was a fun experience. I decided on a star topology with my data set on my TrueNAS server as the central hub. The dataset is shared over my home network via an SMB share and also synced to Linux, mobile and remote devices using Syncthing. There was a bit of an initial struggle dealing with UNIX file permissions causing sync issues, but all is well now. I have highly available, resilient and confidential note taking system with versioning and backups to extend my mind. All the notes are taken in markdown. The plan is to eventually publish my study notes and sanitized homelab notes to my website via some automation. Also envisioning an LLM powered project to aggregate my weekly notes into content on my website and share it out via social media. I have also spent a great deal of time working on Docker container infrastructure and administration. Fedora Core OS became my primary container platform. It’s a fun, auto-updating and immutable Linux OS that is entirely provisioned via a yaml file. I have labed out and deployed a great deal of containerized services in my private home and cloud domains. A lot of time spent experimenting with the different volume and network drivers along with learning the ins and outs of the troubleshooting docker via the cli and managing remote agents via contexts. Also dove into docker compose to codify my deployments for quick/consistent rebuilds or re deployments. My website/webapp is a containerized application hosted in Linode's cloud. I am currently working on the CI/CD pipeline to automatically build, test and deploy this and future/alternate version of this website. I deployed and configured a GitLab server and started building my automation there but was recently persuaded to switch to Gitea instead. Currently working on getting Gitea running locally to manage my repos and control my CI/CD pipelines. I rebuilt my mom’s home network and deployed snort to our environments. It’s been a lot of fun and a good learning experience, and probably deserving a blog entry of its own, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. More to come on this. I also had the opportunity to get some real practical experience with Ansible at work and in my lab. I successfully built a playbook for initial configuration and config enforcement for all the cisco IMC's at my work environment. I will try and get a sanitized/tokenized version into GitHub. I also took the momentum and built out some ansible automation for my lab that has been a real time saver in keeping everything up to date and secure along with standardizing configs for new projects. So much more potential and work to be done here. Jeff Geerlings free YouTube content is a real blessing when it comes to Ansible projects. My highest priority project at the moment is getting this website built out and automated. Hard at work designing the Schema for the 'projects' documentation section along with exploring, testing, and implementing automation solutions for backing up and syncing my databases and content. There are so many more things I could write about, but I am trying to keep the post short. I figure more frequent smaller updates would be much better. Truly excited to see Large Language models and help out here. Thanks all for stopping by. Have a blessed day!