Featured: How Blogging Can Be A Powerful Form of Networking

I was asked to write a post about...this blog! How and why I started it, and how it continues to help me.

With a degree in Network Infrastructure, several certifications, but no real-world experience, I was “overqualified” for junior level roles straight out of college.
Yet I still, simply put, couldn’t even begin to make a living in the field. This was 6 months after graduation, and 100s of applications and rejections in an allegedly ‘hot’ field. I had slipped through the cracks.
Even though I’m in tech, I always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. It occurred to me: what if I wrote about tech?
I decided to put what I had learned to use and start my portfolio, to not only show employers what I learned, but also to remind myself what I could do.
The beginning involved networking with any spare bit of technology I could find in my home - routers from previous ISPs, out of commission phones. Then it grew to tracking how telecom providers operated in my town, day jobs I was contracted to do, which all culminated in a full, 4-day pass to Grace Hopper Convention in 2019.
I wasn’t being paid, but I was being seen because of my blogging.

Read more over Here @ Elpha - and don't forget to share with anyone who wants to get started with the written word (Or is hiring).

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Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return. In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now OpenTofu Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process. Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach. That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init. As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory

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