05-19-2009
Yesterday, I was laid off from my job as a network engineer. I have been fortunate enough to live in an era unlike no other. I've recieved tons of kind words and even possible job leads through twitter. Over the past 2 years, I've used twitter to network with Cisco routing pros, VMware engineers, and network/application security nuts like myself plus tons of other great people. With one tweet I generated a little bit of a stir in my little realm. It's been great so far talking to people who are in my field and I'm connecting with more and more every day. Being a part of a social network is almost vital in this day. I would have never of personally gotten in touch with so many people so fast in my whole entire life if it wasn't for this micro-blogging site. That being said, I'm for sale!! I consider myself to be a Network and Virtualization Professional with some security holes to patch up along the way.
Heres a few things that you won't see on my resume:
Networks scream confidence: I've designed networks that span across multiple states. Using MPLS & Point-to-Point connections and utilizing EIGRP & BGP routing protocols I've created completely failover networks that generate 99.99% uptime. I've also optimized the edge routers processing power by making the routing happen before it gets to the edge. Thus, saving the edge routers from having to do WAN and LAN routing. I've installed Riverbed Steelhead appliances for WAN acceleration. When you spend weeks planning out the perfect routing tables and executing it in such a fashion that you know if a connection goes down or if a router dies, the WAN continues to live on, and the only notification is your monitoring system. The users are blind to the fact something is amiss, and operations continue to go on. Tell me you aren't feeling good about yourself when this happens...
Virtualization drives me: I'm a huge VMware enthusiast. I've taken a datacenter and planned a 98% virtualized infrastrcture. Designing ESX farms from the ground up can keep me alert for hours. I know what is needed to have a completely redundant virtual environment. Sometimes P2Vs can be a pain, but there are little caveats that can keep VMs from running at optimal performance. Developing new strategies to optimize storage and utilize old storage helps companies save space, time, and money. Virtualization is one of those emerging technologies that I can't stop reading about. With the upcoming release of vSphere 4, it's going to be a huge step into the private cloud. Keeping up on emerging technologies and being able to bring the next big thing into my environment is what I consider "fun".
Security gives me that warm fuzzy feeling: When I took my last position, the whole enterprise looked like swiss cheese. Right away I began patching up the holes. I may have stepped on some people's toes, but if a breach was ever made, I wanted to know everything that could have possibly been done, had been. I started off with completely removing telnet from the enterprise and replaced it with SSH. When you deal with sensitive passwords that go to routers or firewalls, telnet is a huge no no. You might not think about it, but Active Directory has some major implications when it comes to users. Is there a reason every person in the IT department should know the domain administrator password? Absolutely not. What about secure VPN? VPN is great when you use RADIUS authentication against Active Directory, if you just have a supplied password for a single VPN login, not so much. I made an effort atleast once a week to check out the ASAs to see if anything needed to be removed from the configs, in addition to already making the changes at the given time. A keyword of advice to other security noobs, only use the ports necessary for a particular application. Oh yea, and create groups to keep it all clean. Last and most certaintly not least is keeping your user and server OSs patched. Get a plan ready that the enterprise can follow because its impossible to keep 100% server uptime...and users don't like the sound of that.
There's a little insight into the way I think and my personal view on some flavors of IT. Did I mention I was for sale? =)
Follow me on twitter: @the_crooked_toe and if you think you know someone that needs an engineer for any of the above, or all three, shoot me an email at kendrickcoleman [@] gmail.com and ask for a resume.